How Green is my IT?

Another IT vendor jumped aboard the Greenwagon. Linksys, the networking offspring of mega-vendor Cisco, has turned Green. We can argue all day about why it has taken so long for IT vendors to get on board, but there’s no point – all we can do is demand that the rest of them get on board. And the only way to do that at the moment is with our purchase orders – just don’t buy any more kit from a non-Green vendor. It’ll only take them a nanosecond to get the message.

Despite the plethora of IT kit which now uses a lot less power than it used to, the packaging the stuff arrives in would require the clear felling of a rainforest along with several barrels of Texas tea. That’s slowly changing and Linksys is certainly doing the environmentally aware thing with gusto and not just repainting everything Green. They actually started with the packaging, and no doubt saved themselves a motza as well as saving a tiny bit of the planet. There is no valid reason the rest of the industry can’t do the same.

Here’s a summary of what the company did to the box its stuff comes in;
• instead of having a “sleeve,” print all the information on the box itself, eliminating the extra “sleeve” material
• reduce the size of the box its products come in
• all packaging and internal documents are printed on recycled paper and with eco-friendly inks (vegetable and soy)
• internal packaging is transitioning to recyclable and bio-degradable materials made from post-consumer materials including recyclables collected in commercial and residential recycling programs, such as office paper and cardboard
• the use of plastic bags is being eliminated where possible

According to Linksys the new eco-friendly packaging and materials provide more than 40% reduction in waste materials compared to the previous packaging, which they reckon, based on the number of widgets they sell every year, will save 790 acres of trees (per year), which is the equivalent of taking 3,000 cars off the road (per year).

This is one area where we don’t want to see ANY competition between vendors at all. Any vendor which hasn’t switched to eco-friendly packaging should be able to contact those which have switched for free advice. They can start competing later to save that extra couple of trees and/or cars. Let’s hope they don’t forget to factor in the environmental cost of delivering their products and also the recycling of the kit their shiny new toys are replacing. Make sure you remind them when placing your order.

The other good news from Linksys (and others of course, but we needed an example) is the massive reduction in power consumption. At long last vendors are beginning to supply energy efficient wall-warts. Linksys reckons its new ones use half the grunt of the old ones. What we’d really like to see is a single power supply with a universal row of sockets along the side to connect all the small items that make up the “add-ons” such as routers, ADSL modem, speakers, WiFi etc that hide under the desk. Why do we have to have a wall-wart for each gadget? They nearly all run on 5V or 12V these days. Perhaps it’s time for PCs to have a row of power sockets on the back to power up peripherals? That would also serve the dual purpose of shutting down the whole lot when you turn off the PC for the day. You do turn off the PC daily don’t you? Thought so.