Sustainable ICT Procurement in HE
The JISC funded Suste-IT project has released a briefing paper on Sustainable Procurement in Higher Education.
Procurement was identified as one of the key areas for activity in the main report from the project published at the start of this year.
Buying the right servers and PCs can make areal difference to an institution’s environmental footprint, not just from the carbon produced from the electricity the device uses through its life, but also from the embedded carbon and harmful materials and processes used in manufacture.
Procurement in HE is a complex landscape, with a number of bodies, directives and standards to be aware of. The briefing paper examines the current landscape and sets the sector view firmly in the context of wider public sector activity in the procurement arena. The paper examines the various procurement bodies active in the HE sector and discusses their role in delivering the sustainable procurement agenda.
The paper examines the various standards – Energy Star, ECMA-370 and EPEAT, and shows what these mean in practice for people within the procurement and IT areas.
In the discussion the authors discuss the issues of Whole Life Costing (Total Cost of Ownership), Carbon Accounting, and the enabling aspects of ICT – that is potential for appropriate investment in ICT to reduce carbon emissions by enabling better building management, and reducing travel by the use of conferencing and through reducing the number of paper documents.
The Appendices to the document include:
- Quick Wins Standards for Desktop computing
- Energy and Environmental Labelling of of ICT Equipment
- Energy Star (includes Energy Star 5)
- ECMA Eco-Declaration
- EPEAT