The EU Ecolabel aims at promoting among European consumers products and services which have a reduced environmental impact. The approach considers the entire life cycle of the products and services covered. Although the European Ecolabel is not specific to IT products, a dedicated group of products is identified. The Ecolabel for IT products is based on criteria related to energy production consumption, the reduction of the number of hazardous substances used, the end of life management and the product design. The European Ecolabel is a third party certified Type I ISO 14024.
The ICT Assessment Methodology provides immediate guidance on the process of identifying and quantifying the carbon-reducing effects of implementing an ICT solution. With its focus on simplifying assessment via a generally-applicable approach, diverse members of the ICT industry, businesses and policymakers should find this methodology a practical guide for approaching the assessment process.
The GENiC project is an initiative supported by the FP7 Program from the European Commission. It aims to develop an integrated management and control system for data centres, encompassing all the main energy consumers and producers: computation, data storage, HVAC, electricity generation and storage. The ultimate goal is to improve energy efficiency in data centres through a holistic energy management approach.
The environmental impact modelling tool allows for the evaluation of energy savings, cost savings and carbon emissions abatement potential of 3 types of cloud computing in 11 different countries. The software was created by Qingtech, a UK based team focused upon providing organisations with both the scientific and business orientated knowledge and tools to quantify and manage the environmental impact of their ICT. The tool provides with results at country level.
GEYSER is an initiative supported by the FP7 Program from the European Commission. The project intends to develop a software tool to help data centres become energy prosumers in a Smart City context, enabling better integration of data centres as a Smart Grid participant, not only a consumer. The GEYSER Vision is based on the premise that Data Centres will act as accomplished energy prosumers within tomorrow’s Smart Cities. They will be adept at using (a mix of) of available energy sources as well as catering for flexible management of the ICT workload.
Green Public Procurement (GPP) for Data Centres aims to develop criteria for EU Green Public Procurement for data centres. The EU GPP criteria will be based on a life-cycle approach and a scientific evidence base, and will provide clear and ambitious environmental information. Two categories of GPP criteria will be proposed:
The Green Code Label, developped by the Green Code Lab, aims at engaging organisations into action and communication towards digital services ecodesign. Organisations are able to self-assess their website based on the data provided by the Green Code Label, and a 2-year label can be obtained after an audit is conducted, following ecodesign best practices principles.
CONTACT
- Website: https://www.greencodelab.org/
- Onwership: Green Code Lab
This paper aims to present main approaches and assumptions of green IT by showing the latest solutions and energy efficient practices in computing industry. In the article author has made a systematic study on several strategies and developments in context to the ICT sustainability as a future asset of growth for modern society. The article focuses on the practices like use, disposal, design and manufacturing as well as on technology based-solutions like electronic products and services e.g. green cloud.
CONTACT
GreenDataNet is a project from the European Commission FP7 Program. The initiative aims at reducing the environmental footprint of growing data traffic, while using data centres as Smart Grid nodes, through smart energy management at server, rack, data centre and network levels. The GreenDataNet Project aims to blunt the impact of the data explosion on the energy economy.
The white paper describes the outcome of an initiative undertaken by The Green Grid in early 2015 to define a metric or set of metrics that can quantify the maximum volume of information and communications technology (ICT) services that can be delivered by a data centre for a given investment (“ICT capacity”) and provide an indicator of the share of that capacity that is effectively utilised (“ICT utilisation”).