e-skills UK Guide

Environmentally friendly IT and reducing waste in your business

Green IT and your business

Few business people could fail to realise the importance of green or environmental issues that now affect all parts of our day to day lives. All businesses, no matter what size, can help to save resources. In addition, by reducing waste a business can save money and establish itself as a socially responsible employer.

IT can contribute a fair amount to your running costs as well as your overall environmental footprint. Over the next few years legislation will increasingly start to affect smaller businesses and will start to force behavioural changes along with overall attitudes to the environment.

The good news is that we can start the process now, and by saving the environment we are able to save our businesses money. By supporting environmentally friendly IT initiatives today, you can be ahead of the game.

This Guide will focus on the top three areas of IT that can help you build an environmentally friendly business.

What is a green business?

There are many measures of how green or environmentally friendly a business is, ranging from carbon footprints through to complex companywide audits. In practice it only takes a few steps to achieve considerable environmental savings and these need not impact the effectiveness of the business.

The focus of the Business IT Guide is, of course IT. To that end we will be taking a more detailed look at IT savings, but don’t forget the non-IT related changes that can also help you become environmentally friendly. Remember, a green business is one that takes efforts to reduce its environmental impact overall and aims to become a socially responsible citizen.

IT and the environment

If you take a look around your work place you are bound to have any number of computers and other IT related equipment in use. IT equipment takes resources and energy to create, run and dispose of and therefore each piece of hardware you use carries an impact on the environment. There is little we can do to influence the creation of IT equipment but there are things we can do that affect the day to day use of IT and its eventual disposal.

Computer power consumption

Of course computer equipment consumes electricity. Most people will start up their computer in the morning and only switch it off at night, leaving it on all day, often wasting power. An obvious solution would be to power down your PC when you go out for lunch and certainly when you leave the office at night. Yes, it may take a while for the PC to boot up in the morning but think of the energy saved.

Modern operating systems have a feature so that if a PC is left idle for a pre-determined time it will automatically enter standby mode switching off the monitor and hard disk, effectively sending the PC to sleep. A few minutes taken to set this up on each PC can start to save money from day one. The benefit of using standby mode is that the PC will restart a lot quicker than from “cold”, but remember it will still be consuming some power, so turning it off completely is always better when possible.

Remember that other peripherals such as printers and external hard drives consume power. Turning these off, especially at night when they are not needed, will also help you save money and the environment???

Printing

20 years ago computer vendors where foretelling the death of the printer as we entered the age of the paperless office. Clearly this is not the case as we simple humans are often better at interpreting data from a piece of paper than we are on a screen. Accepting that printers will be with us for the foreseeable future there are some steps we can take to reduce the cost of printing.

Recycling printer cartridges is an obvious measure as is using recycled paper or maybe a paper of less thickness or weight. Double sided printing is also a great way of saving money as is encouraging printing only when it is absolutely necessary. Once you have printed out documents that you no longer need recycle the paper appropriately. If it is blank on one side and not confidential in nature then use the blank side as note paper, so at least you are maximising the use of the paper. Some email users have a small signature encouraging the email recipient to think before printing out a message. 

If you need to upgrade your printer to support features such as double sided printing take a look at our Printing documents guide.

IT hardware

Most computers are under utilised. Their hard disks are often half empty and their central processor is only busy for a small fraction of the working day. Unfortunately the energy a computer consumes is pretty much the same if it is busy or quiet as it still needs cooling and the monitor still needs powering. To deal with this issue there is a move to consolidate computer hardware so that fewer computers are being used but those that are being employed are working at their maximum potential. This saves money, space and energy. If you look around your office, take a note to see if there are PCs that may be under used and consider consolidating them onto fewer physical servers.

If you need help with this server consolidation, then take a look at our Choosing an IT consultancy suppler guide.

Environmental issues can be complex and very involved, but by taking these simple steps you will start to see an immediate cost saving and benefit the environment at the same time.

Further help

These websites may be of help if you are interested in IT and environmental issues:

Carbon Footprint

DEFRA

Commercial suppliers

We do not recommend specific products or suppliers; instead we provide you with a representative sample which covers the range of suppliers/products available. You may choose to look at these suppliers or products but this is entirely at your discretion.