Dematerial world

With a billion computers on the planet already, the future of IT should be about services, not stuff.

It’s very easy to lose sight of the good things we use computers for when, like many of us, you’re focussed on their massive consumption of raw materials and energy. Fora start, there are more than one billion computers on the planet today. Estimates from the United Nations University Tokyo suggest that manufacturing just one of them requires about 75 times its weight in raw materials and water. PCs across the world emit around a billion tonnes of CO2 each year – about the same as the global airline industry. 170 million of them reach the end of their lives each year, most going to landfill.

It’s clear that green computing requires more of a manufacturer than simply offsetting emissions. What’s needed is a whole paradigm shift. Our view at Sun is that we must move beyond this focus on individuals using computers to a world where people simply have access to computing services. By opting for a shared network, what people get is a better supported service – and of course one with fewer environmental impacts. Think of the advances we’ve seen in answerphones. They’ve moved from being a box in someone’s home to a service available from the phone company that’s accessible from anywhere.

For Sun staff, this dematerialised way of working has become the norm. I travel from office to office with only a smartcard and mobile phone for company. Wherever I swipe my card on the network, my programmes, resources and services appear. I don’t remember the last time I booted up or shutdown, logged in or out, uploaded or downloaded, virus checked or backed up! All of the complexity is hidden from me and I get on with doing my job.

We’ve been working on our Sustainable Computing programme since 2005 – coincidentally the same year as the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive was introduced by the EU – and have brought the benefits of the network model to hundreds of businesses and public sector agencies worldwide.

One of them, the Strategic Health Authority (SHA) for London, has just received a Green IT award for its implementation of sustainable computing. By replacing around 400 traditional 100-watt PCs with 4-watt Sun Rays, they’ve had energy and air-conditioning savings in the region of 75%, as well as reductions in noise pollution. The Sun Ray 2 has no moving parts so is silent in operation, and has brought improvements in air quality because there are no fans. What’s more, the devices should last between 15 and 20 years, so the SHA won’t be needing to ‘upgrade’ to new models. As for upgrades to applications or programmes, these are carried out centrally rather than on every machine.

If the rest of the industry does its part and adopts this ‘utility’ model of computing, minimising energy, material consumption and e-waste, then we can rightly trumpet the real environmental and social benefits that ICT brings. For without computing, we wouldn’t have unravelled the human genome, and would still be exploding nuclear weapons to test them, and we wouldn’t be as far advanced in our understanding of climate change.

The rise of the market economy proceeds apace. So it’s no surprise thatover the next ten years another billionpeople will emerge wanting what we have. Wouldn’t it be great if they embraced cyberspace in a much smarter way than we have been doing in the West?

Richard Barrington is head of corporate affairs and public policy at Sun Microsystems.

Sun Microsystems is a Forum for the Future partner.

20 September 2007

Richard Barrington