Green initiatives just a PR exercise

Check the facts about IT vendor green campaigns

The spate of technology companies instigating green marketing campaigns is a sign that environmentalism has become a competitive differentiator. It is no coincidence that IBM’s Project Big Green, Dell’s Zero Carbon Initiative and Google’s investment in clean energy and green technology all came within two months of one another – green credentials are now a selling point.

But what is the reality behind these PR campaigns?

IBM made two large announcements that tied in with its project. The first was plans to invest $1bn (£500m) in environmentally-friendly products; the second was the launch of a chip that runs twice as fast as its predecessor but uses no extra energy.

More efficient processors have always been a field of competition for hardware vendors. So an investment of $1bn in developing technology that is more powerful but uses less energy sounds impressive, but is actually little different from research and development that IBM would have pursued anyway.

Sun Microsystems has been boasting of its processor efficiency for years, and to its credit has not rebranded this as a big green campaign. It is simply what customers want.

Dell’s initiative will ‘continue to maximise the energy efficiency of Dell products’ – so it will do what the company was doing anyway – and extended its ‘Plant a Tree for Me’ programme to Europe, allowing users to offset the emissions associated with the electricity their computers use.

Unlike the other vendors, Dell has set specific targets – to reduce the carbon intensity of its global operations by 15 per cent by 2012 – but its methods are open to debate.

Carbon offsetting programmes are notoriously unsuccessful, and those involving tree planting schemes have been almost completely discredited. It is almost impossible for such initiatives to make accurate measurements of carbon saved, and emissions are only offset after about 100 years.

In fairness to Dell it has made significant efforts to reduce the amount of toxic substances in its hardware, and has done much to put in place take-back schemes to comply with the Weee directive. The company lies fourth in Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics.

And so to Google, the latest technology giant to announce a green campaign. Google aims to ‘maximise the efficiency of its data centres’ – it has some 450,000 servers, about two per cent of the global total. But the search firm has set no specific dates or targets, nor would it provide any when asked. It is also offsetting emissions that cannot be eliminated directly, a solution we know already to be flawed.

Google refuses to discuss any of its plans in detail with Gartner either, according to the analyst’s green IT expert Rakesh Kumar, who describes the initiative as ‘headline grabbing but without substance’.

Google is building a huge solar panel at its headquarters in California, but it must make more than symbolic gestures to avoid the sort of irony associated with the wind turbines sprouting up on BP service stations.

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