Leaders in the information technology (IT) industry are quickly developing environmentally friendly practices because it is now an important 'social issue'.
This was addressed last month at the Global Green IT Conference 2008 in Singapore. High-profile personnel from several of the world's leading IT providers gathered to share cutting-edge methods and practices among IT providers and vendors in the greening of their products and processes.
For an industry that produces 2 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases, the importance of greener IT solutions are becoming an environmental imperative and an act of corporate social responsibility.
'This is a social issue,' said Eric Lauzon, chief information officer of Nortel Asia and one of the speakers at the conference. 'We all have to change the way we live. Businesses especially have to re-evaluate the way they do things. There is a growing energy requirement and companies have to do something about it.'
For the IT industry going greener means designing, manufacturing and using computers, servers and related resources with proper environmental awareness.
This might mean the installation of more energy efficient central processing units, or the creation of energy saving data centres, or the virtualisation of servers. It may also mean the recycling of IT components and the proper environmentally friendly disposal of electronic waste.