Organisations are just beginning to recognise that being seen as 'green' is good for business. The difficulty will be making sense of the initiatives, and verifying if they do equate to carbon-neutral, or are just a marketing ploy.
This week has seen the likes of Tesco, BT, and British Airways announce they are joining together to extol the virtues of Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility (CSER). In the IT world Michael Dell, founder and chairman of Dell Inc, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week that it was time IT took a lead in environmental issues.
Butler Group believes that other organisations are just beginning to recognise that being seen as 'green' is good for business. However according to Roy Illsley, Senior Research Analyst with the firm, the difficulty will be making sense of the initiatives, and verifying if they do equate to carbon-neutral, or are just a marketing ploy. Full comment from Roy Illsley follows below.
Dell announced a 'plant a tree for me' programme at CES. This would give the customer the option of volunteering US$2 for a laptop or US$6 for a desktop, as a donation that will be used to fund a worldwide tree planting programme to offset the impact of the carbon emissions used to generate the power to run the equipment during its lifetime, which Dell have estimated is three years. Dell did not say if it was donating any funding to the programme to cover the carbon emissions generated in manufacture, and more importantly it did not include server products in the scheme. Servers use more power than laptop or desktop devices because they are typically run 24x7, while laptop and desktops normally operate only eight to ten hours per day.
Dell is not the first IT organisation to announce initiatives aimed at becoming more environmentally aware. VIA, the chip maker, announced in September 2006 that its new C7-D chip would be carbon-neutral from an energy consumption perspective. VIA used UK consultancy, Carbon Footprint, to calculate over its lifetime the impact the C7-D would have. VIA claim that given a three-year lifespan the C7-D would require four trees to be planted.
This questions the Dell announcement as the C7-D is only the processor chip, and if used at full capacity of 1.8GHz it consumes 20W of power. Therefore, the question is whether US$6 for a desktop covers the cost of being carbon-neutral. I would contend that using Carbon Footprint's figures and an estimate from IE, a UK-based desktop management vendor, that an average desktop consumes 200W, and that US$6 would need to fund the planting of considerably more than four trees to be carbon-neutral.
However, another vendor that is very much aware of environmental responsibilities is HP, which for many years has embedded Global Citizenship as one of the seven core elements in its corporate objectives. It is also worth noting that HP has been recycling products since 1987; it developed the Designed for Environment (DfE) policy in 1992, and entered into a joint initiative with the World Wildlife Fund US (WWF-US) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its operating facilities worldwide in 2006.
Butler Group believes that other organisations are just beginning to recognise that being seen as 'green' is good for business. However, as HP clearly demonstrates, if you do not generate headline-grabbing announcements that are aimed at the customers, then your efforts will largely go unrecognised. As customers and investors push organisations to consider environmental issues, we predict that 2007 will become the green year, with many more carbon-neutral initiatives being announced by leading vendors. The difficulty will be making sense of the initiatives, and verifying if they do equate to carbon-neutral, or are just a marketing ploy.
