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Chapter 9 The Green IT Industry Ecosystem - by Ariane Rüdiger
telecommunication equipment (http://bit.ly/BfdH), which were
published on November 18, 2008. Members that agreed to it so far
are Telekom, Swisscom, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Telia-Sonera, Tele-
com Italia, Thomson, and TDC Services.
The EU Code of Conduct for Data Centers is still in its begin-
nings. The reason for establishing it was that data centers use more
and more energy. In some areas in Switzerland, mainly around Zürich,
their energy consumption reaches double-digit percentages of the total
amount of electricity available there. In London, data centers run into
limits concerning the availability of energy resources and are asked to
move outside the most crowded city spaces.
Data centers that become members of the Code of Conduct com-
mit themselves to saving energy by using and installing certain tech-
nologies and best practices that are listed in the Best-Practices-paper
published on the web.
To ease the beginning, companies have to fulfil very limited pre-
conditions, one of which is to install measuring equipment and report
the energy use of the member data center regularly, and at least once
a year. Every year, members are supposed to improve their energy ef-
ficiency. To do so, they can implement new technologies or practices
from the Code of Conduct.
In doing so, they are allowed to label the participating data centers
with a Code of Conduct label for marketing. For data centers, member-
ship is free. But cost may arise for necessary investments - for example
in measurement equipment, implementing new practices and report-
ing. Vendors can also participate, but only as endorsers.
So far, only 18 data centers in Europe have signed up (December
2009). 57 IT companies and other interested parties have become en-
dorsers. The EU representative Paolo Bertoldi, who is responsible for
the project, believes the reason for the slowly growing number of mem-
bers is the financial effort and the time needed to implement the first
steps of the program before the first money is saved. Also, lacking
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Chapter 9 The Green IT Industry Ecosystem - by Ariane Rüdiger
information about the project is a problem in some EU member states.
Lately, a new and finalised version of the Code of Conduct has been
published on the web together with other documents, e.g. an appli-
cation form for data centers, a Best-practice-guide etc. (address see
above).
9.7.2 EU Energy Star
The Energy Star Project (http://www.eu-energy-star.org) is run by
EU and US government agencies in common. On one hand, Energy
Star wants to motivate vendors to improve the energy efficiency of
their products; on the other hand, it wants to enable private people,
companies and the public sector to buy the most energy efficient IT
equipment.
For that purpose, Energy star publishes new rules for the differ-
ent kinds of equipment regularly and revises them every few years or
even quicker. For example, in 2009 a new guideline (v. 5.0) for displays
came into force, documents on servers and on enterprise storage were
published and new guidelines on computers were adopted. Equip-
ment that conforms to energy star regulation is registered and labelled
with the Energy Star Label by the vendor. After that, it is listed in the
databases on the Energy Star web site. The database shows a list of dif-
ferent categories of equipment (from computers to gaming consoles)
and its energy efficiency values. Another list contains appliances only
tested against older versions of the specifications. As Energy Star has
quite a high reputation, a lot of vendors try to guarantee Energy-Star-
conformity of their products.
Important dates and documents are published in the news section
of the Energy Star website. Energy star can be regarded as one of the
most efficient programs to raise the energy efficiency of IT equipment.
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Chapter 9 The Green IT Industry Ecosystem - by Ariane Rüdiger
9.8 EU - Driven By General Public
9.8.1 MakeIT fair
MakeIT fair (http://www.makeitfair.org) is a European project con-
centrated on consumer electronics that receives funding from the Eu-
ropean Commission, but is not organisationally linked to it. The cam-
paign is steered by Dutch SOMO (Centre for Research onMultinational
Companies, http://www.somo.nl) that has itself strong links to Good
Electronics (see above), procureITfair and pcGlobal (see below).
Different from many of the other organisations, it is strongly influ-
enced by church organisations, Northern and Eastern European organ-
isations and especially addresses young people.
Project partners of MakeITfair are SwedWatch and Fair Trade Cen-
ter from Sweden, finnWatch and finnish Association for Nature Con-
servation from finland; Germanwatch and Verbraucher Initiative from
Germany. Different from many other projects, there are also organisa-
tions involved from the countries, where electronics or raw materials
are produced: ACIDH from the DR Congo, CIVIDEP from India and
SACOM from China. Organisations from different European countries
support the campaigns of the project. Some examples: BDKJ - Bund
der Deutschen Katholischen Jugend (Germany), Church of Sweden,
Ecumenical Academy Prague (Czech Republic), Gemeindejugendwerk
(Germany), KARAT (Poland), an organisation that focuses on gender
equality, Morgen (The Netherlands), a student organisation for sus-
tainable development, Entwicklungspolitisches Bildungs- und Infor-
mationszentrum (EPIZ, Germany), just to name a few. On their web-
site, one finds some of the publications also offered for download by
Good Electronics or procureITfair, but also additional material, for ex-
ample on working conditions in the electronic industry in Central and
Eastern Europe. The web site also contains an information section with
detailed information about the materials used to produce PCs, mobile
phones and - astonishingly - cars and how much of it is recycled. Ad-
ditionally, they supply information about where the materials come
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