With Australia running out of water and the recent media buzz on the Emissions Trading Scheme, it’s impossible to ignore the increasing impact changes in the environment will affect our lives and the way we do business. Increased public awareness has a positive benefit as businesses are expected to operate in a corporate and environmentally responsible manner. All the major energy providers offer ‘green power’ plans which source energy from wind farms, hydro-electric and solar panels. Even the humble beer is getting a green marketing makeover with Australia’s first 100% carbon offset beer Cascade Green (actually not a bad brew) and as the icing on the cake it comes served on a recycled cardboard coaster embedded with seeds. Check back here in a few months to see if it actually grows anything!

It’s not just products that are getting the green treatment, as increasing numbers of service based and government organisations are getting in on the act.

Power Usage

Green power, turning machines off, efficient equipment. Sleep times

Enabling power saving features on your computers including

• Auto monitor switch off
• Auto sleep

With the advent of LCD screens the concept of screen-saver is a bit of a fallacy, so it’s fine to just auto turn your monitor off or have a black screensaver which will use less power.

At LightBulb we do our bit by making sure that our all servers that house our websites are carbon offset. On a more personal note we love office recycling!

Impact of IT equipment on office cooling should also be considered. This is particularly relevant in server rooms with a high concentration of machines in a small space, but normal office computers will also have a significant effect.

Packaging

If you’ve bought a new PC recently you’ll know how much foam, plastic and cardboard packaging is used, Dell provide packaging amounts in it’s product specification sheets. When making bulk orders, organisations can often request to have their shipment packaged on pallets rather than individually wrapped, but a scary number of vendors don’t offer any bulk packaging system.

Once you’ve unwrapped your shiny new equipment it’s important again to dispose of the packaging appropriately.

Paper Usage

The dream of the paperless office never quite happened did it? The rise of business computing has only made it easier to print and therefore produce more and more paper. The best way to reduce paper usage is to use some common sense and apply the adage “Think before you print”. Here are some other ideas to think about before you sacrifice half a tree!

• Use track changes in Microsoft Word instead of printing and breaking out the red pen.
• Get your IT department to produce print statistics to raise awareness of the paper output of your organisation.
• Enforce print quotas to ensure people only print what is really needed.
• Print double sided or 2 per page if your printer can handle it.

Again common sense prevails and some simple measures like:

• Use recycled print paper
• Recycling used paper for note paper
• Make sure to use the correct disposal of paper in your area (Adelaide City Council area)

Recycling Equipment

The consumables aren’t all you have to think about when formulating a successful green approach to your IT.

Some other things to think about are:

• Disposing of old Mobile phones
• Reselling computers at auction rather than recycling – many vendors such as Dell offer recycling or buy-back schemes.
• Recycling old IT equipment like printers, scanners and computers (look out for the Adelaide City Council computer recycling day)

In a nutshell,, a lot of making your IT that little bit “greener” is just plain old common sense. But bringing together some of the above strategies can have a great impact especially if applied to a large corporate structure. Contact us if you would like to learn more about how LightBulb Digital can help with energy audits, statistical analysis and advice to make sure  your organisation’s technology is friends with the environment!