A number of sustainability rankings in the US and Europe let us take a look at how telecom providers perform compared to each other and to broader tech sectors. Vodafone is the top global performer; Sprint-Nextel is tops in the United States. Sprint was rank tops in the US for its take-back program.

This is solar-powered base station on top of a mountain in Lapland (Finland).

Remote ICT infrastructures are embracing renewable energy for everything from earthquake mitigation in Japan to CO2e reduction in India to military microgrids in Afghanistan. Asia leads world in renewable bases stations, according to MDI.

Liquid cooling was once a staple of large-scale computing, but has largely been replaced by air cooling. We identified several efforts to bring liquid cooling to the server world in our first version of this post a year and a half ago. Here is an update featuring a UK company.

Microsoft has announced plans to spend $5.5 million to build a zero-carbon data center pilot project in Wyoming. A source of very low carbon electricity is key to such projects. Microsoft's power generation fuel? Municipal sewage!

Conflict minerals continue to fuel violence in central Africa, but e-gear manufacturers are making progress. Intel and HP are the leaders in recent ratings, which show most have improved.

Here we track gear for consumers and businesses seeking ICT resiliency. This is a wide range of ICT-related gear suitable for areas or situations lacking reliable grid power. Our latest is a is a hand-cranked USB charger.

Two Green ICT threads have converged in the natural disasters of Japan's earthquake/tsunami and America's hurricane Sandy. One is how energy-efficient gear, infrastructures, and practices can contribute to more sustainable ICT. The other is how efficient ICT can combine with renewable energy sources to deliver education, medicine, and other basic services to areas with little or no dependable electricity. From this converge comes a vision of sustainable ICT with is both efficient and resilient.

The increasing energy efficiency of ICT gear means solar-based ICT is an growing option for rural areas. We written about solar ICT projects spanning education on a Pacific island to telemedicine in Kenya. Now, we've learned about a education project supported by Korean tech giant Samsung.

There are many examples of where a focus on equipment utilization can be more sustainable than other green ICT tactics. Here are some examples.

Much Green ICT focuses on computers: servers in the data center and desktops in the office. Don't forget that disk-based data storage, which can cost an organization $25/GB/month, also offers opportunities. Here's a look at the progress manufacturers and users have been making in recent years to manage data storage's energy consumption. SSD is the latest option.