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Vol 3, No 1, 2011 ISSN: 2146-0744 (Online)
GREEN ICT (INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION
TECHNOLOGIES): A REVIEW OF ACADEMIC AND PRACTITIONER
PERSPECTIVES
Ahmet Ozturk
Information And Communication Technologies Authority, Turkey
Koray Umit
Koc Sistem, Turkey
Ihsan Tolga Medeni
Cankaya University, Turkey
Burak Ucuncu
TURKSAT, Turkey
Meryem Caylan
Middle East Technical University, Turkey
Fırat Akba
Çankaya University, Turkey
Tunc Durmus Medeni
Middle East Technical University, Turkey
ABSTRACT
People have needed to reach information day by day when information technologies have
been participated in our life. This creates some demands about meeting Software &
Hardware requirements increased with parallel. Especially, increasing in hardware
needs which are about software systems, cause production of more powerful systems.
These powerful systems have caused bigger size of footprints day by day. Especially in
our era, we need to take some precautions about global warming with making these
footprints smaller. That is the reason why Green Information and Communication
Technologies have been defined by engineers to create some solutions to decreasing these
footprints and meet companies requirements with using high engineering and its green
approaching solution ways. Green Information and Communication Technologies have
been investigated by academicians and Practitioners’ Perspectives.
Key Words:
sustainability
Green Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), Green ICT
JEL Classification: O30
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1. INTRODUCTION
The new important issues for enterprises, governments, and societies are caring
environmental issues and adopting environmentally sound practices. Information
Communication Technology (ICT) is a good way to reach this outcome because it
improves our overall energy productivity while maintaining a high quality of life and
dynamic economy. ICT provides many benefits to the society. First of all, it decreases the
energy needed to design, manufacture, and distribute the ICT devices and equipment.
Secondly, it increases the operating efficiency of the ICT technologies when they are
installed and online. The other benefit is optimizing the performance of other energy
using systems. The last one is substituting ICT related services for other goods and
services within the economy.
ICT has a key role in terms of driving innovation productivity and growth in
organizations and how people live, work and interact, so ICT sector continues to grow
and is predicted to comprise 8.7% of global GDP by 2020 ( The Climate Group, 2008,
p.13). However, ICT creates some environmental problems. Computers and other IT
infrastructure consume significant amount of electricity, placing a heavy burden on our
electric grids and contributing the greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover; IT hardware
poses severe environmental problems both during its production and its disposal.
According to Murugesan (2008), IT is a significant and growing part of the
environmental problems we face today (p. 24).
At the same time, due to the ICT, all economic sectors can become more energy efficient.
By increasing the energy efficiency, it reduces the environmental impacts of other sectors
because ICT allows existing processes to be optimized or enables entirely new, more
energy efficient processes. Therefore; the energy that could be saved by ICT- induced
energy efficiency is estimated to be several times larger than the overall energy
consumption of ICT itself (GeSI, 2008, p. 10). According to the Climate Group, the
European Commission recognizes this potential and hopes that Europe will achieve its
target of 20% greenhouse gas reduction by 2020 to a relevant degree through the
deployment of ICT (Coroama, Hilty, 2009, p. 1-2). Gartner states that “With the
centrality of information technology and charges that the industry is responsible for 2% of
the world’s total CO2 emissions” (2007) Cited in Osch and Avital‘s article (Green IT to
Sustainable Innovation, 2010, p.1). To reduce IT’s environmental problems and to create
sustainable environment, every computer greens its IT systems because green IT is a
good way to eliminate bad results, and it is not surprising that the issues of Green IT/IS
has gained momentum among academics and practitioners, so Green IT is the latest
indicator of sustainable business practices. The decision about implementing or not to
implement Green IT strategies, policies, and tools is a challenge for organizations. While
practitioners have been highly interested in this topic for a while, recently, there is also
growing interest on this topic among academicians (Brooks, Wangs, Sarker, 2010, p.1).
Reducing energy cost (at a minimum) and environmental friendliness are the
phenomenon of Green IT. In October 2007, a global “Green IT” survey was done by IT
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professionals regarding to using professional services providers to assist in the planning
and implementation of green IT policies and practices or not. The report (Mines, 2008,
p.2) concludes that:
• The green IT services market will grow rapidly to nearly $5 billion in 2013. After
2013, the market will decline as most companies will have completed their
initial round of green IT implementations.
• Assessments are the hook, tech implementations the big catch. The
implementations phase of green IT services engagements will account for 65%
of total market revenues in the coming years.
• Service providers with a corporate strategy perspective are the likely long-term
winners. Today, most of the actions in Green IT are around the data center
energy efficiency done by Dell, HP, and Intel. However, the long run winners in
this market will bring a holistic approach to customers looking the incorporate
IT into a corporate wide effort to improve environmental responsibility. This
approach is pioneered by services providers like Accenture, Deloitte and EDS.
Nowadays, Green IT is a growing concept for academicians and practitioners, so this
report focuses on some key areas that need examination in research surrounding Green
IT. Firstly; we will look Green IT’s definition because there seems to be a gap in an
understanding of what is meant by Green IT. This is an important step before any
rigorous academic research can be conducted on it. Then we will examine managerial
attitudes towards Green IT which is related to effectively implementation of green It.
Also we will look the practitioners’ side to exactly see the real life examples of green IT
and academicians’ side. Finally, after we analyze all features and benefits of the Green
IT, we will assess the future of the Green IT. The aim of this paper is to review the
current literature on Green IT studies from both the academic and practitioner journals
and publications.
2. BACKGROUND OF GREEN IT
2.1. Sustainability of Green IT
Sustainability of Communication Technologies is one of the main aims of today.
Sustainability is associated with aspect of economic, environmental, and social impact of
organizations (service suppliers, administration, academia, enterprises etc).Green IT is to
be taking into account in the sustainability. These two concepts are linked to each other.
Green usually means energy efficient and environmentally friendly and sustainable means
“planning and investing in a technology infrastructure that serves the needs of today as
well as the needs of today while conserving resources and saving money” (Pollack, 2008,
p. 63). To reach effective results, sustainability is important but Green IT is the first step
for all these purposes. As can be seen the Figure 1, a nested approach to sustainability,
sustainable innovation is the broad and it contains Green IS/IT (Osch, and Avital, 2010,
p.3). At this time, it is important to realize the difference between Green IT and Green
IS. Watson et al. (2008, p.2) state that Green IT is mainly focused on energy efficiency
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and equipment utilization, whereas Green IS, in contrast, refers to the design and
implementation of information systems that contribute to sustainable business processes.
Green IT addresses issues such as:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Designing energy efficient chips and disk drives
Replacing personal computers with energy efficient thin clients
Use of virtualization software to run multiple operating systems on one server
Reducing the energy consumption of data centers
Using renewable energy sources to power data centers
Reducing electronic waste from obsolete computing equipment
Promoting telecommuting and remote computer administration to reduce
transportation emissions.
After we looked the broader concept of Sustainability innovation, it is the time for the
Green IT to analyze very exhaustively. Murugesan (2008, pp.25-26) suggest that Green
IT is:
“The study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers,
servers, and associated subsystems- such as monitors, printers, storage devices, and
networking and communications systems- effectively with minimal or no impact on the
environment. Green IT also strives to achieve economic viability and improved system
performance and use, while abiding by our social and ethical responsibilities... Thus
Green IT includes the dimensions of environmental sustainability, the economics of
energy efficiency, and the total cost of ownership, which includes the cost of disposal and
recycling… It is the study and practice of using computing resources efficiently.”
Figure 1. Sources of Sustainable Value (Osch, and Avital, 2010, p.8)
If we consider studying Green IT, we must think that Green IT includes power
consumption and management, manufacturing practices, data center design and
operations, recycling and end of life concerns for computer equipment, total cost of
ownership issues, both micro and macroeconomic issues, system performance and
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efficient systems use, and environmental, social and ethical practices relating to IT
acquisition, use and disposal (Brooks, Wang, Sarker, 2010, p.2).
2.2 Reasons and benefits for using green IT practices
Adopting Green IT practices offers business and individuals financial and some benefits.
As Osch and Avital (2010) discusses there are listed benefits of Green IT. Reducing
power consumption and lowering cost have the highest percentages among the other
benefits because most companies’ first priorities in the environmental issues are energy
efficiency and cost control imperatives. Because of the regulations, market based
mechanism to address climate change rise, businesses will focus on environmental
sustainability. For example; some buyers like Dell and Wal-Mart are asking their
suppliers to take measures to “green up” their products and their manufacturing
processes. They force their suppliers to behave environmentally sound practices. In the
next five years, the inevitable result is that most of the companies will offer a range of
new product and services, and new business opportunities will emerge.
Environmentally Sound Practices by Using IT
Green IT objective is to reduce energy consumption, thereby minimizing the greenhouse
gas emissions by using computer systems and operating data centers. There are certain
strategies (Murugesan, 2008, pp. 27-29):
• Reducing energy consumption by PCs: By making small changes to the ways
we use computers, we can significantly decrease energy consumption. For
example; most personal desktop computers run although they aren’t being used.
This leads to waste electricity also computers generate heat and require
additional cooling, which adds to the total power consumption and cost for
people.
•
•
Enabling power management features: When we aren’t using computers, we
can program them to automatically power down to energy saving state without
sacrificing performance. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
estimated that providing computers with a sleep mode reduces their energy use
by 60-70 %( As cited from Murugesan’ s “Harnessing Green IT: Principles and
Practices” articles,2008, p.28), thus the software places the PC into a lowerpower consumption mode, such as shutdown, hibernation, or standby, and
monitors into a sleep mode when they aren’t being used. For the organizations, it
is difficult to manage their enterprises’ PC power consumption, so a pragmatic
approach is to use software, we mentioned above, such as Surveyor from
Verdiem (www.verdiem .com) that offers network-level control over PCs and
monitors.
Turning off systems when not in use: This strategy is the most basic energy
conservation for most systems.
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•
•
•
•
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Using screensavers: Screensaver that displays moving images, which continually
interacts with the CPU, conserves less power than a blank screensaver but it
reduces energy consumption by only a small percentage.
Using thin- client computers: Thin client computers draw about a fifth of the
power of desktop PC but it is used only with active participation and
wholehearted willingness from users. This is achieved with employee education
by changing their computer habits, so enterprises must take into account of their
employees’ feedback and address their concerns, and encourage them to join in
green computing efforts.
Greening Data Centers: The rise of internet and web applications leads to rapid
growth of data centers. Enterprises are installing more servers and expanding
their capacity and each server draws far more electricity than earlier models. Also
operational costs for data centers are increasing because energy pricing is
increasing. Besides the cost, availability of electrical power is becoming a
crucial issue for many companies whose data center have expanded steadily, so
these constraints force the companies and IT departments to reduce energy
consumption by data centers. They are taking some actions to increase data center
efficiency by using new energy efficient equipment, improving airflow
management to reduce cooling requirements, investing in energy management
software, and adopting environmentally friendly designs for data centers and new
measures to curb data centers’ energy consumption. The coming three topics are
related to green data centers: energy conservation, eco-friendly design, and server
virtualization.
Energy conservation: As we mentioned above, data center operating expense is
high and most of the costs are related to cooling, so IT industry is inventing new
ways to help address this issue. For example, companies like IBM, HP,
SprayCool, and Cooling are working on technologies such as liquid cooling, nono
fluid-cooling systems, and in-server, inrack, and in-row cooling. Other ways to
make data centers more environmentally friendly are new high density servers,
hydrogen fuel cells as alternative green power sources also by applying
virtualization technologies; the total power consumption of servers and the heat
generated reduces.
Eco-friendly design: Organic compound (VOC), countertops made of recycled
products, and energy efficient mechanical and electrical systems at optimal
efficiency. Eco designs make use of natural light as well as green power which
means that electricity generated from solar or wind energy to run the data center,
so adopting eco-friendly designs provides many benefits to the enterprises such
as complete design control, reducing heat and adding light. For instance; many
American enterprises are adopting the Leadership in Energy and Environmental
Design (LEED) standards maintained by the US Green Building Council
(www.usgbc.org) for building new data centers. LEED focuses on some key
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areas: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials
selection, and indoor environmental quality.
• Virtualization: It is a key strategy to reduce data center power consumption. It
enables data centers to consolidate their physical server infrastructure by hosting
multiple virtual servers on a smaller number of more powerful servers. These
lead to less electricity and simplifying the data center. Also it reduces the data
center floor space, the data center’s energy demands and makes better use of
computing power.
2.3. Management perspectives towards the green IT
Nowadays, Green IT is the most effective investment among the companies. Enterprises
are increasingly going green and looking more deeply IT operations to reduce corporate
energy consumption and become more environmentally responsible because Corporate IT
organizations are feeling increasing pressure, and finding growing opportunities to
improve their sustainability practices and they are responding by building capabilities,
forming alliances, and positioning their resources to capture mindshare and wallet share
of user companies putting green IT initiatives in place. The new market is created for
companies namely Green IT services. This market is defined as:
“Consulting services that help enterprise IT organizations reduce their
companies’ environmental impact by assessing, planning, and implementing
initiatives that make the procurement, operation and disposal of IT assets more
environmentally responsible”(Mines, 2008, p.2)
For example; strategists at a broad set of IT services providers, from data center
specialists like HP and Intel to corporate strategy consultants like Accenture and Deloitte
are positioning to participate in nascent market (Mines, 2008, p.1). Also companies feel
the pressure from government regulators and legitimate environmental watchdogs to align
their business with environmental sustainability practices. For example; Kyoto protocol
agreement means that organizations are now motivated more than ever to monitor their
carbon emissions because Green IT practices will be inevitable in the future. Therefore;
managing IT infrastructure concerning Green IT requires a strong commitment from the
echelons of corporate leadership, namely senior IT management (Sarkar and Young,
2009, p.2).
If we want to green our IT, we must consider and analyze internal and external
constraints like cost, customer requirements, and government regulations. After
determination of applying Green IT, enterprises should develop a green IT policy,
outlining aims, objectives, and goals, plans of actions, and schedules to effectively
implement Green IT strategies to their organizations. To green their IT, enterprises can
take any one or a combination of the following three approaches (Murugesan, 2008,
p.31):
•
Tactical incremental approach: With this approach, enterprise protects the
existing IT infrastructure and policies and incorporates simple measures to
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accomplish their moderate green goals such as reducing energy consumption.
These measures are easily implemented with a minimum cost but these are only
short term ad hoc solutions.
• Strategic Approach: In this approach, enterprises develop a comprehensive plan
addressing broader aspects of greening its IT and implements distinctive new
initiatives. For instance; an enterprise can implement new energy efficient,
environmentally friendly computing systems, or it may develop new policies on
procurement, operation, and/or disposal of computing resources. Although this
approach considers cost efficiency and reduced carbon footprint, it also thinks the
other factors such as branding, image creation, and marketing.
• Deep green approach: This approach improves the highlighted strategic
approach. For example; an enterprise adopts additional measures such as
implementing a carbon offset policy to neutralize greenhouse gas emissions. With
this approach, we can look deeply by including planting trees, buying carbon
credits from one of many carbon exchanges, or using green power generated from
solar or wind energy.
3. LITERATURE REVIEW
3.1 Academic literature
Although Green IT is becoming more common in discussion, there is little academic
research about this topic. The existing literature related to environmental sustainability is
dominated by industry practitioners, industry consortiums, industry research groups,
environmental groups, governmental bodies and international organizations. However;
academics have only recently begun to take into account Green IT. From the review of
the literature, there are three main factors. These are motivational factors, organizational
factors, and technological constraints (Kuo, 2010, p.4)
•
•
•
8
Motivational Factors: There are three motivations to induce corporate
environmental responsiveness: competitiveness, legitimation and social
responsibility. Competitiveness is related to Organizations’ profitability such as
reducing cost and generating more revenues. In order to avoid penalties and
lessen risk, organizations comply with norms and regulations, thus organizations
protect themselves and survive. Social responsibility motivations are related to
‘feel-good’ factors and are solely internal within the organization.
Organizational Factors: These factors are related to internal environment of
organizations such as human resources and capabilities. If these factors aren’t ‘t
available in the appropriate quantity and at the necessary quality, Company may
unable to act, so when senior management is strongly supportive of
environmentally sustainable initiatives, the extent of green IT in organizations
should be significantly higher.
Technological Constraints: Technological constraints may play a more
significant role in limiting an organization’s ability to begin certain Green IT
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initiatives because some actions related to green IT depend on some qualified and
innovative technology, so if companies don’t have enough technology,
undertaking green IT initiatives may become difficult.
Green IT is a new field, so there is less academic research. Table 1 (Brooks; Wang and
Sarker 2010) shows some academic literature about green IT.
Table 1: Academic Literature (Brooks; Wang and Sarker 2010, p.6)
3.2 Practitioner Literature
In this part we look the Green IT practices from practitioners’ points of view and we give
the specific examples which are done by companies regarding to green IT and literature
review of practitioners’ side. The published literature from practitioners’ side of
information technologies falls into four complementary categories: Green use, Green
disposal, Green design, and Green manufacturing. (Murugesan, 2008, p.27). These are the
holistic approach to the problems. Their meanings are:
• Green Use: Using computers and other Information systems in an
environmentally sound manner in terms of reducing energy consumption.
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Green metrics, assessment tools, and a methodology (ISO 14001) for effective
use and practice.
• Green disposal: Refurbishing and reusing old computers and properly recycle
unwanted computers and other electronic equipment. Disposal and recycling
practices are responsible, sustainable, and comply with applicable regulatory
requirements along with the pollution prevention (Murugesan, 2008)
• Green design: Energy efficient and environmentally sound component,
computers, servers, and cooling equipment designs. Design and strategies for
environmental sustainability including data center design and allocation (
Cameron, 2009; Going Green with IT, 2008)
• Green Manufacturing: Manufacturing electronic components, computers, and
other associated subsystems with minimal or no impact on the environment.
Energy efficient computing including power management and virtualization
(Cloud computing and SaaS) (Big Blue Goes Green, 2007)
In addition; they are linked to the three sided diagram from Siggins and Murphy (2009).
These are three orientations to adopt Green IT: eco-efficiency, eco collaboration, and eco
innovation (Brooks, Wang, Sarker, 2010, p.5). Green use and Green Disposal relate to
Eco-Efficiency, Green Design relates to Eco collaboration, and green manufacturing
relates to Eco Innovation.
Green Software
Greening software is also important for the practitioners in terms of speed, energy
monitoring, speed with new inventions, and grouping of new software (Abenius, 2009,
pp.60-61)
• Speed: Computers’ lifecycle is significant for every user which means that usage.
As users, we are more sensitive about speed especially while we are browsing
Internet. On the market, there are predeveloped tools for cutting electricity costs
or speeding up a web site or both such as the Runtime Page Optimizer (RPO).
• Energy Monitoring: By using any of the existing energy monitoring tools to
manage power, something classified as Green software can be achieved. These
tools allow visualization of the power consumption and possibilities to choose the
level of energy savings and calculation of estimated savings among other features
like IBM Active Energy Manager and Edison by Verdiem.
• Speed with New inventions: Swedish company Oricane founded in 2006 by
Ph.D. Mikael Sundström is the best example for the greening or sustainable
software. Oricane develop what they claim to be green software technology for
many Internet applications to reduce the total power consumption of the Internet
and minimize the environmental impact of Internet’s explosive growth. They are
doing this by optimizing all decision processes in software with new potential
algorithms. Ultimately, the power consumption of the hardware on which the
Internet is built will be reduced.
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•
Grouping of green software: So far, we looked three different types of green
software. Following Table 2 shows that the last one is the grouping these actions
and tools.
Table 2 Green Software (Cited in Abenius, 2009, p.60-61)
3.3 Examples of Green IT Services From Different Angles through the Vendors
The approaches of the vendors from different angles towards the green IT can be
categorized as (Mines, 2008, p.8):
•
•
•
•
Services arms of IT systems manufacturers( Dell, HP, Intel, and Sun):
These companies’ service practices are pretty tightly tied to their product
offerings; thus, tend to be focused on data center design and optimization.
IT systems integrators/outsources(CSC, EDS, Getronics, and Wipro)
Getronics and Wipro are data center oriented, CSC and EDS have broader visions
of corporate green initiatives and their IT’s role within them.
IT consulting giants(Accenture, Deloitte, and IBM)
These companies objective is to help clients position IT as an enabler and
contributer to wide ranging green business initiatives. They approach IT from the
corporate sustainability and CSR perspectives
Telecom services supplier (BT)
They focus on helping clients address their green IT challenges and opportunities
With respect to Green IT/IS, mentioned in previous pages, HP is the best example. The
company is the forerunner in the IT industry. It was the first company to set recycling
programs from 1994 onwards and it was one of the key drivers of several industry
initiatives for green IT/IS and sustainable innovation. The greening and sustainability
efforts of HP in each of the above mentioned phases are summarized in Table 3.
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Table 3. The Sustainability Journal of HP ( Osch and Avital, 2010, p.7)
Case Study (Computer Sciences Corporation- CSC)
Australian developed initiative, GreenWay, is adopted throughout CSC in 2008 for all
environmentally sustainable innovations (Shown on Figure 5). CSC is a
“Leading global consulting systems integration and outsourcing company... With
the mission to provide
customers in industry and government with solutions
crafted to meet their strategic goals and enable them to profit from the advanced
use of technology.”(CSC 2008a)
GreenWay represents improvements such as virtualization to existing IT technology but
extends to improving all environmental aspects of operations from: solutions provided to
clients; operations in data centers; and efficiency improvements in facilities. The major
goal for the GreenWay in 2008 is to reduce carbon emissions by 25% by 2010(from 2007
levels) (Elliot and Binney, 2008, p.6). In addition; a review of practitioner publications
are summarized in Table 1.This table indicates that Green IT is usually associated with
technologies for improving the energy of data centers (ACS, 2007; Mitchell, 2008;
Pettey, 2006) for reducing the environment impact of IT operations (Nunn, 2007); and the
use of IT as an enabler of organizational wide green initiatives (Gartner, 2008; Mines and
Davis, 2008). It encompasses not only hard technological solutions but also soft business
practices and managerial actions to make IT decision making as eco friendly as possible
(Info~ Tech 2007a).
4. FUTURE OUTLOOK AND CONCLUSION
Investment in environmentally sustainable IT is the key to future success. A growing
number of IT vendors and users are moving towards the green IT and thus assisting in
building a green society and economy. When organizations are faced with more green
taxes and regulation, they will favor green IT solutions. When we look at the
government’s actions through the green IT, they can create new legislation to encourage
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ICT vendors and users to be more energy efficient in the future. Corporate Leaders Group
on climate change states that “We need strong policy framework that creates a long term
value for carbon emission reductions and consistently supports the development of new
technologies” (Global Action Plan, 2007, p.6) This means that in the future Greening
activities will increase. From the vendors’ points of view, they must improve their
transparency, accuracy and quality of the environmental information and technologies
because these actions will differentiate organizations from each other. Green IT will
significantly help organizations to reduce their environmental impact.
After reviewing Green IT perspectives of both practitioners and academicians, there
appears many overlap between them. When existing academic literatures and practitioner
literatures come together, greening IT can be most meaningful and powerful.
Environmental sustainability is growing as an importance concept among both
practitioners and academicians. Business executives expect environmental themes to
become preeminent issues and they have already begun to follow green IT strategies.
However; although there are many studies available in the practitioners’ side, it is still not
known its meaning exactly, so this paper provides good understanding about green IT.
Green usually means energy efficient and environmentally, so greening IT leads to
reducing power consumption, lowering carbon emissions and environmental impact, and
lowering costs for the organizations and individuals. Ultimate goal of the green IT is
sustainability and eliminating environmental bad results. However; applying Green IT is
not easy because everything related to organizations’ internal and external environment
must consistent with Green IT applications because if businesses don’t prepare needed
floor such as motivation in terms of competitiveness, legitimation, and social
responsibility or technological and organizational capabilities, they can’t be success. Its
impact on the businesses is very high in terms of the profitability and environmentally.
Therefore; Green IT is the best practices among the organizations and best research field
for the academicians.
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