There are several things that organization leaders could conjure up when we talk of the path to sustainability. They could take a look into 401(K) or retirement plans, review company benefits and compensation and develop sustainability policies concerning environment, health and safety.  So in celebration of Earth Day, we are putting together a few ideas to help enterprises advance their strategies that can help businesses endure the sea of industry changes with the aid of green technology.

Technology demands a certain level of exploitation when it comes to the environment, especially with consumption of energy and natural and mineral resources.  Metal alloys that are building blocks of tech devices are harnessed from the earth’s bounty.  One of the most important components that any business, whether IT or non-tech, is energy.  This is the food that fuels day-to-day operations.  But there is no such thing as an unlimited resource, and our use of natural resources shouldn’t be a one-way street. Today, technology has found its way to give back to Mother Nature by going green.

What Experts Say About Sustainability and Green Technology

When we talk about sustainability, we must keep the following elements in mind: environmental, economic and social. Sadly, we are witnessing an erosion of these elements in the last few decades. But arguably the most alarming is the disruption of sustainability within the environmental aspect.  Our biological systems are struggling to stay diverse—an essential factor to keep them productive over time and be able to support the needs of human beings especially.  Energy conservation is not only helping the environment, but managing the consumption of resources can also positively affect the economics of the enterprise.  Simply put, businesses get more savings.

Maintaining environmental management and high workforce safety standards  is what Joe Kava, Senior Director at Google’s data center construction and operations, thinks would sustain their enormous organization. In his Google Green blog, he shared a few tips on how they were able to stay on par when it comes to quality of their EHS (environment, health and safety) division:

“All of our U.S. owned and operated data centers have received ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certification. We’re the first major Internet services company to gain external certification for those high standards at all of our U.S. data centers. In a nutshell, both standards are built around a very simple concept: Say what you’re going to do, then do what you say—and then keep improving. The standards say what key elements are required, but not how to do it—that part’s up to us. So we set some challenging goals for ourselves, and we asked our auditors to confirm that we’ve followed through on them.”

Kava elaborated, “here’s an example of the kind of improvements we’ve implemented: Like most data centers, ours have emergency backup generators on hand to keep things up and running in case of a power outage. To reduce the environmental impact of these generators, we’ve done two things: first, we minimized the amount of run time and need for maintenance of those generators. Second, we worked with the oil and generator manufacturers to extend the lifetime between oil changes. So far we’ve managed to reduce our oil consumption in those generators by 67 percent.”

In his book, “CREATING A SUSTAINABLE ORGANIZATION:  Approaches for Enhancing Corporate Value Through Sustainability”, consultant Peter Soyka outlines the changes that are coming to enterprises globally and what should they do to survive and remain sustainable.

“In particular, EHS and sustainability professionals, and professionals working in other functions and disciplines who have an interest in corporate sustainability, must develop a more complete understanding of how the financial community operates, what its members value, what motivates their behavior, and the basis of their growing interest in corporate sustainability.”

Soyka also mentions the green IT trend we’re currently experiencing:

“Following a bit of a lull in the ensuing years, “greening” and more general notions of corporate sustainability have again recently come into vogue. This is in part due to increasing concerns about climate change and other global-scale environmental issues, but also because a number of large U.S. multinational corporations have mounted highly publicized campaigns to “green” their operations. Today, it seems that “green business” is a bandwagon that many people and organizations are seeking to drive or at least jump onto.”

Five years ago, IBM started their Smarter Planet campaign. Its primary goal is to develop products, services and technology that will help develop green buildings and data grids that will create a unified connection between utilities, transportation systems, police and fire departments, supply systems, health care and more.  IBM is looking to retain $10 billion revenue by 2015 for this project. One of the minds behind this undertaking is Guru Banavar, vice president and chief technology officer of IBM’s global public sector unit.  He share his ideas on how we can take advantage of technology to go forward with sustainability:

“Technology is going to be a crucial enabler for us to get to the next level of sustainability for our cities, to achieve economic and environmental sustainability and so forth. It’s not just going to be about technology. A number of elements need to come together to make our cities more sustainable, including the right leadership and governance. These are all complex factors, but technology adds a lot of value.”

He immediately rejected the idea of a utopia with technology around, saying, “technology provides a significant role in almost every sphere of activity that a city engages in. While I do not want to paint a utopian picture that technology will solve all ills, I do believe that technology is very important for taking us to a more sustainable future.”

Which Industries Are Going Green?

The growing green IT trend has touched base with several industries. In fact, those who are employing this technology are receiving significant support from environmental groups and the government. There have been several companies in the tech community to trail the green meadows. These include big brands such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell and Cisco.

EMC – data centers

Big data and virtualization heavyweight, EMC has built a massive data center complex in North Carolina in 2011. This 450,000 square foot facility carries eco-friendly features that include free air cooling, a rainwater harvesting facility and a flywheel to supplement additional battery storage the facility would otherwise use.  Last month we rounded up the top 5 green data centers that include a few familiar names: Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Apple and HP. It seems as if the big names are getting greener. Good for them, and for the environment, as their combined efforts have a global impact.

HP – Paper Thin

Hewlett-Packard is one of the most relentless crusaders of exploring environment-friendly solutions and work spaces in the tech sphere. Its New Data Center has already signed with Norwegian real-estate firm to erect the most eco-loving data center existing. The 30,000 square meter facility will house servers to support the government and private sector’s need for cloud infrastructure. The heat emitted by servers will be recycled back to reusable energy.

Google – citywide initiatives

Search titan Google also realizes the importance of green technology. In December 0f 2011 they invested $94 million to aid Sacramento-based Recurrent Energy. The solar power firm will use the money to enact four different photovoltaic projects in the city, which will be utilized to power more than 10,000 local households via a two decade agreement with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. The projects are already contracted for 20 years.

Facebook – anti-coal

Google’s rival and the social world’s capital, Facebook is also advancing sustainability within its business pillars.  At the end of 2011 they hired former Google’s green energy czar, Bill Weihl. This move was triggered when Greenpeace, an environment on a mission to save the environment, openly criticized them for using colossal coal-powered data centers. Over a year ago, Facebook shared their green data center technology to the public, noting how they were able to save up to 38% in power consumption.

Yahoo – open-air flow

A few months earlier, Yahoo and Oracle put into practice a few green technologies of their own. The search engine biggie came up with a new design for a green technology-enhanced data center named Coop. T he innovation was modeled after the idea of chicken coops, where most of the cooling for the structure is provided by open air-flow. This prompted an estimated 40% in energy savings compared to other data centers of similar size.

Oracle – local efforts

Oracle has also featured sustainable business ideals in its yearly event, Openworld. Here, the computing giant demonstrated how they were able to reduce paper usage to 76%, saved 800,000 gallons of water, 140 tons of waste diverted to landfills and 60% of their employees’ food consumption are organic and from local growers.

Crawling out of a very disappointing year (cutting of more than 10,000 jobs), Cisco has managed to catch the attention of both investors and environmental activists in its recent Q2 Call.  The latest report by Greenpeace ranked the least polluting tech firms by assigning a score ranging from 0 to 100, and Cisco earned 49. In comparison Google, who was ranked no. 1, received 53 points out of 100.

Green jobs

A dramatic increase in posting of so-called “green jobs” in the United States has been observed for the first quarter of the year. In fact, the figures from the same period of last year were doubled. This is a strong indication that companies are bringing in people specifically to propel their green initiatives.

Not only is this a good sign for the environment, but it also boosts the employment rate that has long been causing headache to the nation. Bernard Ferret, Founder and CEO of The Green Job Bank, explains the reason behind the upward trajectory of employment opportunities within green IT:

“This increase in green job postings is due to the growth of the green economy. It is the proof that the market for renewable energy, clean technology and environmental projects is healthy, and growing at a steady pace.”

Apart from the big players in search and social networking, mobility also has their fair share of celebrating green technology.   Perhaps the most fun of all are the eco-themed apps. These include gaming app Whirleo and Light Bulb Finer that helps users switch from standard incandescent to energy-efficient light bulbs.

Indeed, green technology, while it may be considered a high-risk market, can generate revenue and keep business healthy for much longer, environmentally and economically-speaking.

Turning on the “Green” Mode

Data centers are fast becoming the go-to move for energy efficiency. As mentioned above, data centers have become the center of green technology for industry leaders such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo. In the recent 2012 Energy Efficient IT Report, almost 81% of the respondents say that they reduced their data center cost energy usage by 1% or more. This maybe a small fraction for those who do not know how data centers tend to eat up massive amounts energy. This is actually a relatively good output. More than half of these mentioned were able to save by employing new cooling approaches, and around 30% said that new data center purchases over the last three months have been very helpful.

When we search for tools to boost green initiatives, HP has one of the widest arrays. A few days earlier, OPENonline, a leading provider of background checks and investigative services has partnered with HP to deploy HP BladeSystem with Virtual Connect, Integrated Lights Out (ILO), Thermal Logic Technology, Active Cool and high efficiency power supplies. The set of tools have catalyzed reduction in power requirements and overall data center footprints.

Still pushing for greener and leaner milieu, HP launches Paper Thin—an ultra lightweight paper designed to reduce environment impacts of printing and paper storage for up to 22%.  According to the company’s Environmental Programme Manager for Imaging and Printing Group, Dave Lobato, this new printing technology will require less natural resources such as water and fibre to produce, while also reducing transportation costs and emissions.  “Some enterprise-class customers bring paper in by the pallet load, but around 45 per cent of that is stored, so this could significantly cut down on storage space,” he says.

HP’s long-time foe is also highly involved in green trends. The Dell Blade Servers are crafted to reduce IT management costs and improve energy efficiency. According to the company, Dell Blade Servers consume up to 20% less power per blade versus the competition. Small- to medium-scale businesses do not require managing large centers of technical infrastructure. In this case, Dell Blade servers have a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy. The blades have many components removed to save space and minimize power consumption while still having all the functional components of a computer.

As stated earlier, green tech trends are boosting cash influx to the business. Running within a parallel idea is Clean and Green Tech Strategic Sales Team Service from Good Leads. Although their group’s name is pretty exhaustive, they can bring the green (money) by assisting companies with clean and green technology. They will be responsible in leads generation through the tool, Prospect Builder and utilize premium outsourced inside sales methodology for marketing and business development.

While sustainability and green technology sound good from a corporate standpoint, there are still unanswered questions surrounding these ideals. There are those who continue to question the honest motives behind companies implementing green tech, saying that the only reason why this environmental cause surfaced is because the growing demands in modern-day IT will only be met by human and natural exploitation. Therefore, the idea of green technology to reform the exploitative system was discarded. However, many IT departments across organizations now claim that they are conserving and making good use of natural resources to curb harmful effects of human activities to the environment. The cynics would ask: are these developments enough? I’d say these are good first steps that could be emulated by others, and it’s certainly better than nothing.