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Green IT: fact or fiction?

Customers must separate rhetoric from reality

Dell and HP both claim to be leading the way in Green IT, but there is some difficulty in making sense of the initiatives, according to analyst Butler Group.

Michael Dell, founder and chairman of Dell, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas earlier this month, that it was time IT took a lead in environmental issues.

Dell announced a ‘plant a tree for me’ programme at the show, giving the customer the option of volunteering US$2 (£1) for a laptop or US$6 (£3) for a desktop, as a donation that will be used to fund a worldwide tree planting programme.

The programme will offset the carbon emitted generating the power used to run the equipment during its lifetime, which Dell have estimated is three years.

But Roy Illsley, senior research analyst at Butler Group, says customers need to verify if schemes equate to being carbon-neutral, or are just a marketing ploy.

'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,' said Illsley. '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.'

Research by 1E, a UK-based desktop management vendor, shows that an average desktop consumes 200W, and that US$6 (£3) would need to fund the planting of considerably more than four trees to be carbon-neutral.

Illsley compares this case to that of HP. 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.

'As HP clearly demonstrates, if you do not generate headline-grabbing announcements that are aimed at the customers, then your efforts will largely go unrecognized,' said Illsley. '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.'

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