Japanese multinational computer company Fujitsu compared green practices in I.T. industries in each country over time. The report, the first international survey of its kind, wants to better understand the sector’s role in making businesses sustainable.
Senior level employees were asked 80 questions about their green I.T. policies, behavior and technologies. A total of 638 responses were received from all countries.
Britain emerged as the best performing country, getting an overall Green I.T. Index score of 61 out of 100. This was attributed to the country’s stringent carbon reduction and reporting regimen and its awareness of green computing practices.
The United States ranked second to Britain. Australia lagged, bogged down by poor metrics, followed by India, where end-user green I.T. practices are not widely implemented.
The report concludes that the pace of development of green practices in the sector has been sluggish. The four countries received a comparatively low average index of 56.4 out of 100, showing lack of maturity.
The enterprise sector – encompassing data centers, networking, communications, cloud and software architecture – and the end-user sector, which includes personal and departmental computing and printing, made the most improvement.
One major problem is the lack of good metrics that enable green practices to be properly measured and monitored. Even in the United States, which has the highest information technology power consumption, only half of the respondents knew how much power the industry was consuming.
Environmentally unsound procurement and electronic waste practices also remain widespread.
