On the road to a greener future

The Highways Agency is responsible for the safe management, maintenance and operation of the strategic road network in England. Our roads carry one-third of all traffic and two-thirds of all freight.

We recognise that while travel and transport is economically essential, it is damaging to the environment. My role is to provide customers with information before and during their journeys to help them make a choice.

By encouraging pre-journey planning, customers can decide whether, when and how to travel. On-the-road information helps customers avoid being caught up in congestion and reduces the environmental impact of their journey.

Our customers want information services to be reliable, trustworthy and useful. Crucially, they now also want them delivered in a sustainable manner.

The Highways Agency has about 3,500 staff, of which more than 2,000 are based in nine main office locations. We also have staff at our seven Regional Control Centres, the National Traffic Control Centre and 33 outstations across the country, from where our traffic officers patrol the motorways.

We also have a small number of home workers. And with our services spread across such a broad base, many workers would frequently find themselves travelling between locations, unless we make the most of our IT systems.

We need positive action to reduce our environmental impact, to meet the challenging targets for reduced energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, and to increase the use of renewable energy. I believe IT has a key role to play.

We are setting our green computing agenda at an individual level, an IT level and an enterprise-wide level. The organisation encourages staff to reduce the amount they print, switch off any unused devices and make use of virtual meeting technologies, such as telephone and videoconferencing.

The Highways Agency has provided recycling facilities for paper, cardboard, batteries, toner cartridges, mobile phones, CDs and even hard hats.

Our approach is not based on “what to recycle” but “why can’t you recycle?” And during the past two years, the organisation has halved the amount of paper it uses and has removed more than 350 printers, copiers or scanners from our offices.

We look to use low-energy equipment and extend our hardware refresh cycles. Equipment disposal, meanwhile, is carefully managed.

The organisation is introducing remote switch on/off mechanisms and is consolidating servers. We have recently launched document management systems to avoid the need for multiple copies of documents, reducing our disk space requirements.

Finally, we also consider sustainability in our investment business cases and we extend the approach to our suppliers and partners. The Highways Agency wants to know the products we are buying come from organisations that take green issues seriously.

In short, the organisation has started a journey towards a greener IT future. We are setting targets, working with our stakeholders, raising awareness with our staff and, most importantly, taking action.

Denise Plumpton is director of information at the Highways Agency and spoke at the recent Green IT 08 conference in London