B1BLOG

So, in Part 1 I did a bit of a thought-experiment around the idea of Green IT out­side of the con­text of the Cli­mate Change Debate.

Hav­ing said that what­ever one’s views on cli­mate change*, being green is still good thing, what can we do in prac­tice to reduce waste and power consumption?

It’s not easy being green

Print double-sided, use recy­cled paper and use secure-printing. Since switch­ing to double-sided print­ing by default, we’ve saved roughly 25% on our paper costs. On one printer alone, we have avoided print­ing 38,000 sheets of A4 paper since it’s instal­la­tion.

Read the full post »

This week I’m off to the Green IT Expo at the QEII con­fer­ence cen­tre in Lon­don and have been giv­ing some thought to what I hope to get out of it. On one level, I think we’re doing a pretty good job here at Ban­ner — we’ve addressed many of the obvi­ous issues (waste, recy­cling, power con­sump­tion etc), but there is always room to take things a step fur­ther and make improvements.

This got me think­ing about the sub­ject of ‘green IT’ and more broadly, ‘green busi­ness’ and the back­drop against which we make deci­sions and for­mu­late pol­icy.

Read the full post »

Chan­nel Reg­is­ter is car­ry­ing a story about some new For­rester research into IT buy­ers’ atti­tudes to greener products.

In a sur­vey of 124 IT buy­ers in North Amer­ica and Europe, they found good news in that 85% said green fac­tors are impor­tant. How­ever only 25% had writ­ten green cri­te­ria into pur­chases and only 15% were aware of ven­dors’ green initiatives.

For­rester senior vice pres­i­dent Christo­pher Mines said:

We heard two rea­sons why green mat­ters: effi­ciency and cor­po­rate respon­si­bil­ity. Most IT decision-makers told us that a green pur­chase would only hap­pen in the con­text of cost reduc­tion. These are hard-headed, ROI-driven busi­ness deci­sions.

Read the full post »

Happy new year, I hope Santa brought you every­thing you wished for (obvi­ously if you opted for peace on Earth you may have been some­what disappointed).

It’s cus­tom­ary at this time of year to make pre­dic­tions for the 12 months ahead. Of course, this is largely an exer­cise in ensur­ing you look pretty stu­pid at the end of the year. (It’s almost as if, sim­ply by pre­dict­ing the future, you can guar­an­tee that it won’t come to pass.) So with that in mind, and not want­ing to pass up the oppor­tu­nity of look­ing stu­pid, here are mine:

Read the full post »

I pre-ordered World­chang­ing’s User’s Guide for the 21st Cen­tury some time back and promptly for­got about it (as you do). Then, last week, the Ama­zon fairy came and every spare minute since has seen my nose buried in it.

It’s a book that empha­sises the dire sit­u­a­tion the world finds itself in but is then both inspi­ra­tional and prac­ti­cal in chart­ing a path for­ward. From the introduction:

If we face an unprece­dented plan­e­tary cri­sis, we also find our­selves in a moment of inno­va­tion unlike any that has come before… Humanity’s fate rests on the out­come of the race between prob­lem solvers and the prob­lems them­selves. The world is get­ting bet­ter – we just have to make sure it gets bet­ter faster than it gets worse.

Read the full post »

Inc.com has a nice fea­ture pro­fil­ing 50 (US) com­pa­nies doing inter­est­ing stuff in the green space.

A com­pany called Nanoso­lar seem to have cracked a way to, in effect, “print” solar cells, reduc­ing the cost and offer­ing a more ver­sa­tile alter­na­tive to tra­di­tional panels.

Grist has an inter­est­ing arti­cle, Trans­form­ing the auto­mo­bile about the future of the car and some of the options avail­able and another on how the media is chang­ing its approach to cli­mate change reporting.

Tree­hug­ger fea­tures a new solar pow­ered phone from DoCoMo as well as a link to The Waste Book, a direc­tory of recy­cling busi­nesses.

Read the full post »

So, 0 to 60mph in 4 sec­onds, 130mph top speed and… it’s elec­tric. This is the Tesla Road­ster and I want one.

To me, it looks a bit like a Lotus Elise – which is no bad thing (the site has some nice eye candy on it). It has a 250 mile range which coun­ters one of the real lim­i­ta­tions of pre­vi­ous elec­tric cars. The only prob­lem is that it’s left hand drive… oh, and comes in at about $100k… and it’s sold out any­way. But if it wasn’t for all that…

Here’s some video taken at the launch:

Read the full post »

Tree­hug­ger has an item on IBM’s new green research unit.

From Tree­hug­ger:

The cur­rently unnamed busi­ness unit will focus on ideas that will directly ben­e­fit the envi­ron­ment, develop them, mar­ket them and imple­ment them.

Read the rest here.

(BTW, if any­one involved on this at IBM would like some help from a really good cre­ative agency I know, click here to get in touch.)

A press release from the Clean­tech Ven­ture Net­work has started to place some esti­mates for the VC oppor­tu­nity for clean tech over the next few years. From the release:

…the Clean­tech Ven­ture Net­work® fore­casts that clean­tech ven­ture cap­i­tal invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties for major insti­tu­tional investors glob­ally through 2009 are esti­mated at $17 bil­lion, with $10 bil­lion in North Amer­ica, $5 bil­lion in Europe and $2 bil­lion for the rest of the world.

Read the full post »

The con­clu­sions of the Stern Report are fright­en­ing by anyone’s standards:

• a 2˚C rise in tem­per­a­ture could mean 4 bil­lion peo­ple suf­fer­ing water shortages
• it would mean 40% of species fac­ing extinction
• it could lead to a fur­ther 200 mil­lion peo­ple going hungry
• if we don’t do some­thing very seri­ous, very soon (ie now) cli­mate change could shrink global economies by 20%

And this is just the begin­ning.

Read the full post »