Green IT Crowd urged to consider social, ethical & environmental issues.

Making IT and technology more green is about more than just switching your monitor off at night - it is also about all the environmental, social and ethical issues surrounding production of the equipment.

That was the message from Miriam Kennet, director of the Green Economics Institute, as she addressed the Green IT Expo, in London, last week. 

"Being 'green' is about providing social and environmental justice at the same time" she said. "It is up to the user and the buyer to make sure that what they are doing is not causing harm."

Mobile phones are one example of a widely-used piece of technology which is linked to the exploitation and suffering of people in developing countries, she told delegates.

Mobiles use coltan, an ore produced from the mineral tantalum, which is mainly found in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

According to the United Nations, smuggling and exportation of coltan has helped fuel the war in the Congo, a crisis that has resulted in millions of deaths since 1998.

The mineral is often mined by prisoners in exchange for early release or by child labour, Ms Kennet said.

"We are all complicit in this - everyone who has a mobile phone," she said. "If we want to live in this high-tech world we have to think about these supply chains.

"It's up to us in the high-tech world to see if we can engineer our supply chains to make them more green."

But this does not mean that companies and individuals should ignore the more obvious ways to help the environment, by reducing their energy use and CO2 emissions, Ms Kennet added.

"It's going to be one of the big stories, I think, as IT develops," she said.

A report produced last year by UK charity Global Action Plan revealed that the ICT sector has a carbon footprint similar to that of the aviation industry . Environmental charity Global Action Plan, which commissioned the research, argued the sector now needed to be given the same level of attention as aviation or 4x4s.

An Inefficient Truth, says many UK companies are using vast amounts of energy by inefficiently storing data and failing to adopt sustainable habits such as switching off units at night.
It also revealed that many ICT departments have no idea how much energy they are using and are often not involved in their companies' sustainability policies.

Trewin Restorick, director of Global Action Plan, said: "We just cannot make the connection between our use of ICT and climate change. Somehow we have got to change."

He accused many companies in the ICT and communications sector of using green claims as a marketing tool.

The organisation is calling on the Government to change legislation governing the way data has to be stored in the UK.

He said: "Government legislation is just not connected at all to this debate. It is pressing more and more demands on businesses to store data for ever and if they bring in identity cards and road pricing all of these things are going to put more pressure on."

Shadow environment secretary Peter Ainsworth, who was hosting the event, added: "I think the main role for Government is actually to lead by example and to join up its thinking."

The report revealed that the ICT sector is now responsible for around 2% of man-made global carbon emissions.

Researchers found that only 40% of ICT departments are using more than half of the available space on their data servers and more than 60% thought they would run out of data storage within a year.

The report also raised concerns that more than half of the ICT departments surveyed do not see their organisations' energy bills and two-thirds do not pay their share of bills.