A third of UK office workers make no attempt to reduce the amount of resources they use in the office, according to a survey of 1,800 staff by government advisory group Envirowise.
As part of our Green Computing campaign, Computing is striving to raise awareness and to make IT departments more environmentally friendly, while at the same time reducing costs and improving efficiency.
While individuals are increasingly taking up the notion of recycling and power reduction in the home, this behaviour is not being mirrored at work.
Professor Toby Wall, director of the Institute of Work Psychology, says employers have the power to cure our split environmental personalities.
‘This is a symptom of our pressurised workplaces, where there is often too little time or encouragement for people to take action on waste,’ he said. ‘Research shows that if people are monitored closely and given strict performance targets, they will focus on their core tasks at the expense of other activities.’
Chris Roskilly, network analyst at Crawley Borough Council, which has signed up to the Computing Green Charter, says he is one of 20 or so green champions across the organisation.
‘We have one green champion in each work unit whose job is to promote environmental policy and encourage staff to participate in recycling and waste minimisation practices,’ he said.
‘There are some people who are a bit resistant to it, but it is generally a good way of getting ideas back, as well as establishing a more environmental culture in the workplace.’
Crawley Borough Council has a number of environmental policies in place.
‘We have established a culture throughout the authority of switching off unused equipment. We have been doing this for a number of years,’ said Roskilly.
‘When we deploy desktop PCs we ensure that power-saving features, such as turning off the monitor and powering down the hard disks, are turned on.
‘Nearly all our printers are set up to duplex by default. Paper is recycled as much as possible, and any paper that has been printed on only one side is collected and bound into A5 notepads for staff by our reprographics department.’
Each of the council’s sites also measures and monitors energy consumption of utilities such as electricity, gas and water. The council knows its exact power consumption in the server room, and is about to embark on a VMware virtualisation project to reduce the number of servers and decrease power consumption by an estimated 40 per cent.
All of Crawley’s redundant hardware is either donated to charitable organisations or disposed of in a responsible manner through licensed waste carriers, which take the unusable equipment to sites where it can be disposed of properly.
The Open University (OU) has a similar policy for hardware, says Richard Adams, the organisation’s manager of training and desktop support – see box.
‘Everything we do – and have done for a number of years – with the machines that we dispose of is compliant with the WEEE directive,’ he said.
‘We have a green purchasing policy and are working closely with our hardware providers to adopt greener products.’
Adams is responsible for the provision of desktop hardware for the OU, which comprises some 8,000 computers and 2,000 printers. A quarter of the hardware is replaced every year, and is disposed of using accredited third-party recyclers.
‘We only replace it with stuff that has a smaller footprint and is compliant with the Energy Star standard,’ he said.
‘We have also installed 5,000 flat-screen monitors over the past few years because they have far lower power consumption than the old cathode ray tubes.
‘We are also looking at ways to configure machines more intelligently so that standby comes on as standard.’
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