Sustainable irony: Alive and well at the Green IT Expo

The following is a guest commentary by Aydin Kurt-Elli, CEO of Lumison, a UK-based business ISP:

If I learned one thing this week from Green IT Expo in London it’s that irony is alive and well and appears to be the most sustainable of all energy supplies, powering entire marketing departments in some cases.

The event took place at the Barbican centre in London (10 & 11 November) and on the surface appeared to be like any other IT show. Looking back I can imagine the preparation many vendors went through:

• Messaging about how IT can solve the ills of climate change? Check.
• Research showing how the harmful effects of IT can be reduced while still buying our products? Check.
• A box-load of plastic toys and glossy brochures to hand out on the show floor? Check.

The irony was clearly lost on most exhibitors. Many were still handing out plastic toys, stress balls, gadgets and gizmos to bring traffic to their stand. Once there, attendees had thick glossy brochures thrust into their hands. The leaflet litter about the place was considerable.

For two days, the Barbican became the place where paper and PVC went to die. It was an elephants’ graveyard of sustainability best practice gone wrong.

On the Lumison stand we were handing out apples sourced from within a couple of hundred miles of the event. Other than that the Lumison team were doing nothing more than talking to people, I’d like to think fairly honestly, about a number of measures we’ve introduced that mitigate to a degree both energy consumption and hardware churn.

Meanwhile some people asked the team why we didn’t have brochures, or USB sticks … had our marketing team dropped the (stress) ball on the freebies and handouts?

I mention this not to score points but to kick-start a conversation about a problem which still dogs the IT industry: the tendency to talk a good game, as though it’s possible that we can advertise and market our way to a greener future.

One simple fact to consider: IT can never put our impact on the environment in credit. It will always have a negative effect. No matter how many glossy brochures are printed off extolling the benefits of a new laptop, that piece of kit is always going to be part of the problem, not the solution.

Green IT is a myth. Greener IT, however, is a little more pragmatic and a worthy goal.

What a responsible IT industry can do is help us all to work in a profitable, effective way while mitigating some of the negative impact presently linked to IT use. We can reduce power consumption considerably. We can dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of IT vendors and end users. We can all get a lot smarter.

But let’s start by not printing off a whole forest’s worth of marketing collateral and shipping in PVC novelties halfway around the world in the name of greenwashing.