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24/10/2008
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What can be done to reduce the IT industry’s carbon footprint?
 When it comes to industries that have a large carbon footprint (CF) and contribute to global warming, surely the IT industry is relatively innocent? Far from it. Research company Gartner recently estimated that IT contributes as much to global warming as everyone’s favourite culprit, the airline industry, at around 2% of global emissions per year. Some think IT may be even worse.
A combination of increases in computer processing capacity, demanding more and more power, a vast growth in personal electronic devices, and rapidly growing huge markets in China and India, is making the IT industry distinctly ungreen.
The problem is compounded by bad habits – like hundreds of millions of us leaving equipment switched on or in standby mode. In the US, for example, standby mode – known as ‘vampire power’ – is estimated at 25W per home, which means it costs consumers $2.7billion a year and requires the equivalent of 2.5 large power plants.
“Generating this electricity produces 15bn kg of CO2, equivalent to the CO2 from 2.8million cars on the road, around 1% of all passenger vehicles in the US,” says National Semiconductor’s Dave Lewis, who carried out a recent study to see how much switching off devices could save.
Personal electronic devices are as bad. He estimates that powering 1000 1W devices for a year generates 5300kg of CO2 per year – more than the average US car emits in the same time.
The Climate Group recently published a report on global emissions and the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry called Smart 2020, which predicts that by 2020, there will be 4bn pcs, 5bn mobile phones and 900m broadband accounts. Emissions from the whole telecoms infrastructure will double in this period.
But not all is doom and gloom. While IT may be contributing significantly to global warming, it is also seen as one of the most crucial tools we have for combating it. The Smart 2020 report opens with this statement: “While the sector plans to significantly step up the energy efficiency of its products and services, ICT’s largest influence will be enabling energy efficiencies in other sectors, an opportunity that could deliver carbon savings five times larger than the total emissions from the entire ICT sector in 2020.”
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Author
David Boothroyd
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