Wading through the ‘Green Wash’ to initiate innovation

Posted by Karen on Oct 5, 2009 12:00:00 AM

Prior to my current post at Fluidata I worked for one of the UK’s leading environmental consultancies. Here I helped companies to assess and reduce their carbon emissions. Because of this I am often asked for advice on how to reduce a company’s carbon footprint and frequently the answer I give is to fully utilise our IT services. The fact of the matter is that we cannot continue to run successful organisations if we do not continually update our technologies and reduce our air miles. It seems therefore that we must in fact embrace our capitalist ideology and innovative technology to overcome our outdated habits, replaced instead by new tools such as virtualisation and video conferences. The counter argument is that the IT and Telecommunications industry is responsible for 1-2% of the UK greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and it is estimated that by 2020 it will account for approximately “3% of all greenhouse gas emissions, or 1.54 metric gigatons” (Computer Weekly). Despite this huge figure however, this industry will enable other business sectors to reduce their emissions by 7.8 metric gigatons, about 15% of the world's current GHG emissions. These technologies - whether they are virtualisation, cloud computing or video conferencing - all need resilient high speed internet connections to make them a realistic alternative to fat client machines and air travel. For this reason Fluidata have not stopped innovating and improving the services provided to our clients.

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