Jon Curry, head of IT at Cornwall’s ecological park the Eden Project, started looking at how the organisation would refresh about a third of its desktop PC estate in November last year.

The Eden Project has now put in an initial order for 50 Lenovo ThinkCentre A61e desktops and 15 ThinkVision L193p notebook PCs, after conducting a benchmark study that found the latest Dell, NEC and Lenovo systems were able to deliver 40 per cent power savings on the organisations’ legacy computers.

“The most environmental thing we can do is not replace equipment unless we absolutely must, but everything has a finite lifecycle,” says Curry. “It is not just about power use, it is about how they are manufactured – whether they use a lot of recyclable components and packaging, for example.”

The Eden Project does not have a specific green IT policy. Instead, environmentally-sensitive computing is seen as a prerequisite. “There is not necessarily a conflict in doing it right and doing it profitably, and anything we do in purchasing follows sustainable principles,” says Curry. “It is about making all IT sustainable, not just about cleaning up what we do.”

The organisation has trialled Xerox solid ink printers with less ink wastage. While Curry has identified definite benefits, he says the jury is still out until he maintains the devices at the correct temperature and sees how they perform on different types of media.

“We do try to direct users to use centralised multi-function devices rather than individual deskjets, to print in black and white, and we are introducing a card swipe on photocopiers to make people aware of toner levels and how much they are printing and copying,” he says.

The Eden Project is looking to replace about a dozen servers this year, and will evaluate server virtualisation as part of the upgrade to see where environmental benefits can be found. It is also experimenting with a paperless mobile phone ticketing system for visitors, but Curry says the system might be best viewed as a potential project for the future.

“It is great to have a paperless ticketing system from a technology perspective, and very effective, but commercially we are a long way off in terms of public acceptance, and it is still quite clunky,” he says.

The organisation’s senior management team is supportive and attends regular meetings with the IT department. But Curry is not resting on his laurels and recognises there is still much work to be done.

“Do all users religiously turn equipment off and print only when they should? People are people and we have to keep reinforcing those issues to convince them the environmental benefits are worth the inconvenience,” he says.