Climate change: Australian IT's starting point

After spending years researching technology's role in climate change, a Sydney man has created a wiki to share ideas, tips and techniques on going green.

David Hart, IT director at services firm Atlantis Blue, said the project, called Environmentally Sustainable Information Technology, will look at ways to contribute to a global, 100 percent carbon neutral and environmentally sustainable IT infrastructure, and the impact of datacentres, PCs and mobile phones, among other devices.

The aim of the project is to become an encyclopedia-style launch point, rather than a central repository, for millions of systems engineers and other IT workers who want to participate in creating greener information technology infrastructure.

"To date thousands of people have been working uncoordinated in this field," Hart said.

In a brief interview, he said: "I have collected a wealth of knowledge on the topic over the years, and I'm figuring out how to roll it out to the wiki, a task which will be time consuming and require re-researching many items."

Major categories which the Environmentally Sustainable Information Technology wiki will cover include energy efficiency and conservation, environmental safety, and industry policy, standards and rating systems.

Eco-friendly businesses
Only one IT vendor -- Hewlett-Packard -- sits on the New South Wales government's Sustainability Compacts program, a three- to five-year voluntary agreement between the Department of Environment and Conservation and leading businesses to work together on sustainability projects.

As part of the initiative, HP has pledged to deliver incremental landfill diversion targets at its NSW plants and facilities. Sensis and IAG are the two other companies on the roster.

HP has a global plan to decrease its energy use by 20 percent by the end of the decade. The reduction will come from the products it produces as well as internal targets such as dropping power consumption on printers by 30 percent compared with 2005 levels.

Sun Microsystems, IBM and Dell have announced similar plans in the US to address global warming. Sun wants to cut internal energy use by 20 percent, while Big Blue has a seven percent reduction target for greenhouse gases. Dell also has plans to curb energy consumption and recently launched a program encouraging customers to plant a tree when buying a new PC.

News.com's Tom Krazit contributed to this report.

If your company has taken steps to go green, or if you have tips or anecdotes on how IT can help with energy efficiency, e-mail us at edit@zdnet.com.au.