When environmentalists started paying serious attention to business's impact on earth, air and water in the 1960s, industry manned the battlements and the boiling oil started to fly. What a difference 40 years and global warming can make. Being environmentally friendly – "green" in the popular lexicon – is now a business imperative. In fashion terms, green is the new black – indispensable and always in style.
Tech companies will benefit by getting ahead of the green movement because it alters the way they do business now and in the future. Governments are enacting new regulations on everything from emissions to material use to sustainable design. Businesses and consumers have a growing appetite for environmentally friendly products. Against these developments, information technology (IT) isn't particularly well positioned to ride the environmental wave – but it can be. The trick for tech companies is to find their legitimate environmental story, back it up with substance and not overplay it. The message to communicate is that your company can be profitable and innovative while reducing its environmental footprint, helping its customers do that, or ideally, both.
For years IT was considered a relatively clean industry, but now it is identified as environmentally harmful because of its power consumption and use of hazardous materials. Of the two, power consumption is the bigger and potentially more intractable issue for tech companies to tackle. Since the Internet Age began, data center footprints have mushroomed and electrical consumption has risen along with them. Fossil-fueled power plants still produce most of the world's electricity, so IT is seen as a source of greenhouse gas production. On the business side, the electric supply is not rising along with demand. Gartner Research makes the dire prediction that half of the world's data centers will start running out of power by 2008.
Most of the biggest players in IT – Intel, HP, Dell, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft – have created and publicized environmental policies to earn green street cred. IBM has been especially aggressive in promoting its green policies as a business advantage to its customers. It is also, along with the aforementioned companies, a founding member of the Green Grid initiative to lower data center power consumption and promote energy-efficient product design.
Several other IT companies have enacted policies to green up their internal operations by purchasing environmentally friendlier office products, such as unbleached paper; building energy-efficient facilities; starting aggressive recycling programs; and enacting flexible hours to reduce commuter traffic.
As they start wearin' the environmental green, however, tech companies should take care not to strut more stuff than they actually have. Consider the recent example of Dell, which enacted a "plant a tree for me" program to offset the emissions impact of each laptop and desktop it sells. As Computing magazine reported in January 2007, however, the initiative looked more like a marketing ploy than a serious carbon-neutral program. Dell didn't say whether it was donating any funding to the program to cover the emissions generated by manufacturing the computers, according to Butler Group analyst Roy Illslely, which would have been the more substantive move.
The Computing article goes on to contrast Dell's green initiatives with those of HP. The latter company has been recycling products since 1987; developed the Designed for Environment (DFE) policy in 1992, and joined the World Wildlife Fund US (WWF-US) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from its operating facilities worldwide in 2006.
"As HP clearly demonstrates, if you do not generate headline-grabbing announcements that are aimed at the customers, then your efforts will largely go unrecognized," said Illsley. "We predict that 2007 will become the green year, with many more carbon-neutral initiatives being announced by leading vendors. The difficulty will be making sense of the initiatives, and verifying if they do equate to carbon-neutral, or are just a marketing ploy."
Every technology company – no matter what size or market – will benefit by analyzing its business and seeking out legitimate environmental connections. Beaupre clients Dassault Systèmes, SolidWorks and Stratus Technologies are examples of companies that have found their environmental groove without over-reaching.
Dassault Systèmes, and its SolidWorks Corp. subsidiary have publicly articulated their role in sustainable product design (click here for podcast). Sustainable design means using fewer hazardous materials, designing products for easy maintenance and recycling. Dassault Systèmes and SolidWorks software reduces product development's impact by replacing physical testing and prototyping with virtual 3D environments that simulate real-world conditions. Stratus Technologies is educating stakeholders about its role in data center server virtualization. The company's continuous availability servers enable companies to save energy by shrinking their data centers without sacrificing performance or reliability.
In these instances, the stories are a legitimate outgrowth of each company's core business with demonstrable substance behind it. Their green angles don't promise more than they can deliver. They enable the companies to join the green fray without risk of a PR black eye.
– Mike McGrail
