Bristol talks techno footprints and green ICT

Yesterday our friends at Connecting Bristol hosted a Techno Footprint Green ICT Workshop, organised jointly with the council’s Sustainable City Team and The Carbon Trust.

The participants came from a wide range of organisations, ranging from charities, the community and voluntary sector, local authorities, the local universities, NHS, local, national and multinational businesses. It was good to see familiar faces there from Voscur and Knowle West Web.

After a brief introduction from Connecting Bristol’s Stephen Hilton, we were in the hands of consultants Camco, who outlined the CO2 contribution of ICT. In the Bristol area, non-domestic ICT use consumes 125.2 million KWh of electricity, resulting in the emission of 67.3 KT of CO2.

There was lively discussion, both during the presentation session itself and subsequent group session. Points that particularly struck me were the mention of PoE devices, train operator First Great Western’s hardware cutback (thousands of faxes, scanners and printers replaced by multi-function devices with huge energy savings) and long hardware replacement cycle, plus HP’s business travel restrictions. Of course, it was a good opportunity for Bristol Wireless to promote Linux thin clients and relate our experiences with low-impact computing at the Climate Camp and Big Green Gathering. 😉