Responsible Retailing - Obsolete IT impacts the environment

At the Responsible Retailing Summit Richard Barrington, head of public policy at Sun Microsystems UK and Ireland, told delegates that many changes need to take place in the IT industry such as the end of built-in obsolescence, which is naturally having an adverse affect on the environment.

For many people there is an under-estimation of just how much impact IT has on the environment and to prove the point Barrington highlighted the fact that global IT accounts for between two and four per cent of total energy consumed around the world and that in the UK it is between 10 and 12 per cent - and is expected to grow significantly.

Despite this he says nobody had previously looked at IT in environmental terms and although Sun Microsystems had spent time educating people on the issues he admitted there had been some "stumbling blocks". An example, he told delegates that it is the chief information officer who buys the IT equipment but they are not then responsible for paying for the energy so they do not care about energy usage. "We therefore recognised that we had to tailor our language to the different groups in the company and this has been a challenge for the industry," he says.

In order to address aspects of the sustainability issue Sun developed a strategy that included the creation of 'thin-client' systems and brought in a stronger focus on recycling activities in its manufacturing processes. "Less than one per cent of returned machines do not now enter the recycling process. We use half the number of screens that we used last year and we've stopped using plastics and instead use metals and aluminium," he explains.