Email and email attachments have less environmental impact than physical delivery. But email is not without its own costs, both in terms of energy/carbon footprints and organizational productivity. A French company has taken a hard look at this and announced that it will move toward "zero email". At the same time, a German company has stopped its servers from routing some email after hours.

UK's Waste & Resources Action Programme (WARP) conducted a study of the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) content of Household Waste Recycling Centres (HWRCs). What can we learn, besides UK greens' fondness for initials? Turns out media, not IT, gear is the largest category. Upgrades are driving this waste stream.

Vertatique's comprehensive vision of ICT includes e-media infrastructures and practices. News Corporation one of the world's largest media empires, so the company is a logical one for us to track. We first began looking at NewsCorp in July 2006, when company executive (and chairman's son) James Murdoch talked about the media industry going green. Among his claims back then: NewsCorps' satellite broadcasting arm BSkyB is already "carbon neutral".

UK telecom provider BT is working on broadband delivery technology that varies its power in response to demand.
The "latest generation of Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) line cards - which allow up to 20Mbit/s broadband speeds on the last mile of the network - [operates] in an 'always available' rather than 'always fully on' mode…BT’s network infrastructure currently accounts for more than 60 per cent of its carbon footprint and the access network represents a large part." BT reports this new tech - called "cool broadband" - is still under development, but has already been used in a small customer trial.

CME Group Index Services publishes the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes. Which ICT companies perform best on the 2011 Indexes?

Follow our e-devices' global journeys on Greenpeace's interactive map and MIT's tracking animation.

ICT facilities of all kinds are increasingly looking to complement energy efficiency with sourcing renewable energy. We found ISPs already using renewables when we launched Veratique in 2007 and a couple of years later noted the first US television station to use wind power. Now we see diesel being replaced by renewables to power remote telecom facilities. Data centers are also part of the trend.

According to Pike Research, "capital investment in energy-efficient network equipment will reach $122 billion by 2014, representing 46% of the total network infrastructure market...The opportunity is largest for mobile network operators, which we expect will represent almost two-thirds of the green telecom market. This focus is especially relevant as mobile operators deploy 4G networks at scale over the next few years."

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2011

Vertatique analysis of ICT gear life-cycle C02e cited in presentation How educational institutions can provide national leadership in reducing CO2 (Nov 2010, Netherlands)

Direction Informatique cited our post Swiss Data Center Heats Municipal Swimming Pool in its article Centres de données: Des initiatives planétaires (Jul 2010, Canada)

Consumer media device recycling analysis featured by International Electronics Recovery Coalition (IERC) (Sep 2010, Canada)

Analysis cited by Green Cloud CEO Eirikur Hrafnsson in ZDNet post "58% Coal is still 58% Coal" (Sep 2010, Iceland)

Original work cited in ITBusinessEdge's "Time to Make Peace with PUE?" (Sep 2010, USA)

Referenced in CRN's "SSDs Jump to the Next Level" (Aug 2010, USA)

Diary of a Smart Chick reviews Vertatique (Jul 2010, USA)

RSS feed republished by open4energy (USA).