In the past, Information Technology (IT) goals have been driven by economic factors. IT has served to enable computer technology to support business requirements. Green-IT adds ecological factors, to support the desire of individuals and organizations to make wise use of the Earth's natural resources.

Green IT is sometimes called "Sustainable IT." Another term that we like is "Environmentally-Aware IT". Computers are a tool which have enabled many advances in how people work and and how people play. There is no doubt that computers will play a central role in the reinvention of our society around sustainable principles and practices.

When considering the impact of IT equipment on the ecology of planet Earth, it helps to consider the lifecycle of such equipment. This can be viewed in terms of four stages:

1. ACQUISITION – Your selection of products is important, as apparently identical products can have widely different energy requirements.
2. CONFIGURATION – Computer energy efficiency can be helped with the proper system configuration. Some settings are made in a computer’s BIOS such as setting the CPU speed. This can make a big difference in power usage. Also configure the timeouts for turning off the hard-drive and also going into standby and hibernation.
3. OPERATION – The single biggest step to saving energy involves turning a computer off when not needed. This might change how corporate IT Departments operate, since users are often told to keep computers on 24x7 to enable updates.
4. RETIREMENT – Proper disposal of systems that reach end-of-life is important because of the amount of heavy metals that are used in the production of semiconductors.

Whatever term you prefer, there are two important goals:
(1) Promote Computer Enovation: Innovations that are informed by environmental awareness.
(2) Reduce Negative Impacts: Eliminate environmental problems caused by computer use.

One of the most important enabling technologies of the past fifty years has been Information Technology (IT). Few parts of human life have not benefited from the amazing advances which have been made in the area of IT. The tools and technologies of IT can be used to support a wide range of environmental goals. Examples of past successes include the following:

• Energy Efficiency - The Energy Star program is a good example of environmentally-aware innovation. A joint program of the US Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Energy, Energy Star helps protect the environment by promoting energy efficient products and practices. Click for details.
• Environmental Stewardship - You can buy an organic cherry, but can you buy an organic computer? The answer is "yes", thanks to the efforts of the Green Electronics Council and the environmental assessment program that they run. Their "Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool", or EPEAT for short, provides rankings of gold, silver, and bronze based on a wide range of environmental factors. Details available here: http://www.epeat.net.
• Webinars – Use of Internet and computer technologies to connect people in different parts of the world and reducing the requirement to travel to work together. Participants save time by avoiding travel. Companies save money by eliminating travel costs. Planet earth benefits from fewer emissions.
• Tele-commuting – People gain greater freedom when they have the ability to work where and when they wish to. The advent of computer technologies – especially portable computers – means that many workers can work part-time – or even full-time – at home. Much has been achieved in this arena, and much remains to be done to support a distributed work force. Workers benefit from having fewer transportation costs. Companies benefit from workers who can stay focused and avoid the distractions sometimes present in work environments. Planet earth benefits from less energy consumed and fewer emissions.
• Support for Recycling – For more than two decades, manufacturers of computer printers have supported recycling for laser toner cartridges as well as inkjet print cartridges. All of the major printer manufacturers pay the postage for customers to send their old cartridges back for reuse.

As enthusiastic as we are about IT technology, there is room for improvement in several areas. These areas include energy and resource consumption. In some cases, these issues require big changes by product manufacturers. For other issues, there are steps that computer users can take today to reduce these negative impacts.

• Energy Consumption: Computers consume electricity. Many workers leave their PCs running when they leave work at the end of the day. We estimate the electricity costs for an average computer at $96 dollars per year. Turning systems off at night saves $74 per year per system. The Computer Industry Almanac estimates there are 264 million personal computers in the United States. Running all these computers for just 40 hours per week would save over $19 billion in electricity costs, when compared to running the same number of computers 24x7. Why is energy consumption such an issue? The reason is that electricity generation is the single largest source of CO2 emissions in the United States (Source: US Environmental Protection Agency). In 2007, for example, over 70% of electricity in the United States was generated by burning fossil fuels. (Source: Energy Information Administration, Department of Energy). Reducing electricity consumption will reduce the amount of emissions from electricity generation.
• Resource Consumption: For many years, the computer industry has talked about the “Paperless Office”, in which everything would be stored electronically and no paper would ever be wasted. How close have we come? We have a long way to go, as plain old paper accounts for about 40 percent of a landfill’s contents (Source: US Environmental Protection Agency). Not all of the paper is from computer print outs, of course, and yet such a high number shows that there is still lots of room to improve.