What can you do internally?
Make a Plan
Plan with Five Simple Steps to Green Computing...
Here are five first steps you can take toward a green computing strategy:
1. Develop a sustainable green computing plan
2. Recycle
3. Make environmentally sound purchase decisions
4. Reduce Paper Consumption
5. Conserve energy
Develop a sustainable green computing plan
Such a plan should include recycling policies, recommendations for disposal of used equipment, government guidelines and recommendations for purchasing green computer equipment.
Green computing best practices and policies should cover power usage, reduction of paper consumption, as well as recommendations for new equipment and recycling old machines.
Recycle
Discard used or unwanted electronic equipment in a convenient and environmentally responsible manner.
Computers have toxin metals and pollutants that can emit harmful emissions into the environment. Never discard computers in a landfill. Recycle them instead through manufacturer programs such as HP's Planet Partners recycling service or recycling facilities in your community. Or donate still-working computers to a non-profit agency.
Make environmentally sound purchase decisions
Purchase Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool registered products. EPEAT is a procurement tool promoted by the non-profit Green Electronics Council to:
- Help institutional purchasers evaluate, compare and select desktop computers, notebooks and monitors based on environmental attributes
- Provide a clear, consistent set of performance criteria for the design of products
- Recognise manufacturer efforts to reduce the environmental impact of products by reducing or eliminating environmentally sensitive materials, designing for longevity and reducing packaging materials
All EPEAT-registered products must meet minimum requirements in eight areas of environmental impact and be energy efficient to reduce emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases. To demonstrate corporate social and environmental performance, manufacturers must offer safe end-of-life management and recycling options when products become unusable.
Reduce Paper Consumption
There are many easy, obvious ways to reduce paper consumption: e-mail, electronic archiving, use the “track changes” feature in electronic documents, rather than red-line corrections on paper. When you do print out documents, make sure to use both sides of the paper, recycle regularly, use smaller fonts and margins, and selectively print required pages.
Conserve energy
Turn off your computer when you know you won’t use it for an extended period of time. Turn on power management features during shorter periods of inactivity.
Power management allows monitors and computers to enter low-power states when sitting idle. By simply hitting the keyboard or moving the mouse, the computer or monitors awakens from its low-power sleep mode in seconds. Power management tactics can save energy and help protect the environment.
Longer term ways to help
- Virtualise and consolidate your infrastructure using tools like VMWare
- Virtualise and consolidate your storage and networks
- Reduce the number of KVM’s, keyboard video and mouse – make everything lights out
- Manage, observe and improve your air flow, your heat dissipation
- Start buying low voltage processor based servers – the HP/IBM low voltage boxes
- Replace your local disks with SAN, reduce the number of disks that are spinning, requiring power and generating heat
- Switch to a renewable energy provider
- Actively manage your infrastructure, decommission, desktops, servers, switches that are surplus to requirements
- Look at the new energy efficient Ethernet solutions
- Consider making the datacentre lights out – do all the lights need to be on? At 3am?
Everyone has the ability to help reduce global warming. Visit www.climatecrisis.net to calculate your personal carbon footprint, and follow these tips to lessen your impact on the environment.
- Turn off lights, computers, peripherals and appliances when not in use, and set power-saving features.
- Recycle paper, glass, cans and batteries. You can even recycle print cartridges and electronic equipment—visit www.hp.com/recycle to learn how.
- Consider alternatives to business travel and daily commuting.
- Use compact fluorescent light bulbs.
- Turn your thermostat down in the winter and up in the summer.
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