ATIS: Policymakers need to understand 'green' ICT

“When you look at sustainability, you have to consider three aspects, and achieve a balance among them,” Jeffries said. “There are the environmental impacts to be considered, the social acceptance of the solution you would deploy, and the economic sustainability. The solutions we choose have to work for today’s generation and longer term, which means they can’t have adverse affects on down the road.”

The reason balance is important, Jeffries said, is that any environmentally friendly solution that isn’t socially acceptable is likely to face resistance and not be widely adopted, while those that aren’t economically viable won’t last over the long term.

ATIS exists as a place where companies can share best practices, Jeffries said. “Each company has its own goals and will continue to pursue those, but to the extent there are best practices that can be shared, ATIS will be a collection point for these.”

ATIS and the EGG committee also are working on educating the industry on the complexity of the life cycle assessment for many of the products used in the ICT industry, Jeffries said.

“It’s a very broad issue,” he said. “From an ICT perspective, what are the thresholds and at what point do we start factoring in the energy used in making a product into how we calculate our carbon footprint. We want to come up with a consensus as to where that threshold is. We need to define, from a consensus perspective, where we start calculating and do we include material extraction – the mining of the material that goes into chips and components, for instance, and the transporting to manufacturing facilities to be incorporated into a product that we use.”