Deconstructing Carbon Footprint for IT – Measure Up!

A recent report from the Carbon Trust says only 1% of Enterprises in England know their carbon footprint. That brought to mind a presentation at the London Carbonfootprint-IT Summit which made the point that even if an organization knows its overall carbon footprint, reducing it requires detailed knowledge of operations … knowledge that virtually no Enterprise has about IT.

One of our current projects is in the U.S 1% club. Good. But what do you do with a pie chart showing two sources, buildings and transportation, at 50% each? How do you know how the size of IT’s slice on the chart?

Power consumption by Enterprise IT is a bigger number than most believe. But, the only way to know the number is to count it up, piece by piece. It’s a cliché, but true … you can’t manage what you can’t measure. You also can’t get credit for saving money and reducing carbon emissions unless you can show where you started.

People Get Ready There’s a Train Coming

IT product manufacturers and distributors need to look down the track and see what’s headed toward them … Carbon Labeling on products. Some data points … EnvironmentalLeader.com recently posted Supply Chain Leaders Should Prepare For Carbon Labeling from MIT. A Carbon Trust survey reports “43 per cent of all UK senior decision makers have a positive view of carbon labeling”. A storage vendor told me a major Bank RFP required a full life-cycle carbon assessment for products proposed.

More notable than these, Wal-Mart has launched its Sustainability 360 program that extends “beyond Wal-Mart’s direct environmental footprint to engage associates, suppliers, communities and customers.” CEO Lee Scott recently wrote that WalMart is committed to “driving sustainable practices into our supply chain”. Whether you are selling WalMart IT gear or they are selling your electronic products on their shelves, disclosure of product carbon content is bound to happen … and probably much sooner than you might expect.

Life vs. Life-Cycle

A very interesting presentation on carbon Life-Cycle Assessment from the CITRIS Research Exchange at UC Berkeley is available on-line. The talk is on how to send the right signals to consumers and drive environmentally sustainable purchasing. A major take-away is how little analytical work has been on tools for environmental LCA’s for consumer products … and how daunting a challenge it will be to create those tools.

One example highlighted in the presentation was Personal Computers. Their research shows 65% of the life-cycle carbon footprint of a PC comes from the “Production” phase. This data is consistent with other information suggesting less than 20% of the electricity consumed by a PC is actually from the “Use” phase of its lifetime.

While there is no question everything that can be done to reduce energy use by IT systems in operation should be done … and quickly. In the long run, “sustainability” for IT will mean learning to build products that use all natural resources far more efficiently, keeping those products in service for longer useful lives, and following Bill McDonough’s vision to make sure that at the end of life IT products return to the production cycle as technical or biological nutrients.