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Inside the Australia Government ICT Sustainability Plan 2010-2015

Tony Chan | August 10, 2010 | 0 Comments

The Australian government has released an overarching plan to transform its ICT operations with sustainability practices.

The Australian Government ICT Sustainability Plan 2010-2015 outlines strategies and actions for its agencies to lower their emissions and is consistent with the current administration’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for the country by 60% of 2000 levels by 2050.

“Australian Government agencies currently manage significant quantities of ICT equipment, estimated at 350 000 PCs and laptops, 14 000 servers, and 37 500 imaging devices, as well as the consumables used in this equipment such as toner cartridges and copy paper,” the plan’s summary said. “This volume of activity raises significant environmental management concerns over the life cycle of products, mainly relating to energy use, carbon emissions, e-waste and hazardous materials, packaging and the sustainable use of precious and scarce metals.”

Under the new plan, agencies are mandated to adopt:

compliance with ISO 14024 or ISO 14021 at the level of EPEAT Silver or equivalent as a minimum standard for relevant ICT equipment;

compliance with the current ENERGY STAR version for relevant ICT equipment;

product take-back and appropriate resource recovery, reuse or recycling for (a) mobile devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs and Blackberry devices; (b) toner cartridges; and (c) ICT equipment covered by the National Television and Computer Recycling Scheme under the National Waste Policy;6

general use office copy paper to have a minimum post-consumer recycled content of 50 per cent by July 2011, with progression to 100 per cent post-consumer recycled content;

participation by ICT suppliers in the National Packaging Covenant by July 2011 or compliance with the National Environment Protection (Used Packaging Material) Measure (UPM NEPM); and

adoption by suppliers of an environmental management system aligned to ISO 14001.

Furthermore, the plan states some concrete goals for all government agencies by 2015. These include:

to recycle 50% of all general use paper by 2012 and 100% by 2015.

to reduce the internal copy paper per end-user (reams per end annum) from 18.6 in 2010, to 13 in 2012 and 9 reams by 2015.

to reduce the desktop computer and printer ratio from 8:1 in 2010, to 14:1 in 2012 and 20:1 by 2015.

to reduce the number of desktop devices per end-user from 1.6:1 in 2010, to 1.4:1 in 2012 and 1.2:1 per user by 2015.

At the same time, the plan also calls for a drastic reduction in energy consumption.

desktop energy per end-user (kWh per annum, averaged across agency) is mandated to go from 630 kWh in 2010, to 400 kWh in 2012, and 250 kWh in 2015 – a more than 50% reduction in energy consumption per end-user desktop per annum.

reduction of the PUE (power usage effectiveness (PUE) in data centres and server rooms from 2.5 in 2010, to 1.9 in 2015.

In addition to these, large agencies will have to implement an ICT energy management plan, which can be part of a wider agency EMP that includes implementation of improvements from ‘Green ICT Quick Wins’ initiatives, ‘Data Centre Strategy 2010-2015′, internal energy intensity measures and targets, and periodic independent ICT energy assessments for data centres and server rooms.

There are numerous other initiatives that would govern the ongoing management and reporting of ICT and emissions in each agency, including the implementation of strategies to raise awareness, provide training programs, and monitors and reports performance through a ‘GreenICT Scorecard.’

As one of the biggest purchasers of ICT products and services in the country, the plan will require all vendors to be fully aware of their emissions levels since each agency will have to rely on such data to report their progress in the plan.

Does this mean a competitive advantage for some vendors? Will agencies choose one vendor over another because of environmental attributes? How will they balance performance, price and environmental performance in their decision making? Those are all questions that will surely be ringing in vendor’s executive briefings in the coming months.

At a minimum, what the plan does is set a minimum yardstick for vendors if they want to bid for any government contract, which is not a bad start at all.

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