IT products guilty of shunning green labels

Almost 80 per cent of IT products on the market have no stated green credentials or accreditation, according to a major study of about 150,000 products.

The research, from technology services firm Probrand, looked at a wide range of hardware products from 11 manufacturers and found that only 22 per cent carried some form of official environmental standard such as the popular Energy Star label.

Desktop computers, servers and laptops were most likely to have attained environmental accreditation, with 42 per cent of desktops and servers and 36 per cent of laptops touting their green credentials. However, less than a fifth of monitors obtained any form of accreditation and just one in 10 printers had green accreditation.

The report also warned that customers could be confused by conflicting green IT standards, noting that accreditation schemes such as Energy Star, Blue Angel and EPEAT each use different metrics to assess a product's environmental performance.

Gary Price, business analyst at Probrand, said that the failure of many IT products to obtain environmental accreditation was hampering IT managers' attempts to curb their department's carbon emissions. "Fundamentally, not enough products have a "green" accreditation and of those that do, it is very challenging to compare between products or benchmark," he said. "There is no consistent industry measure for sustainability and of the measures that do exist, there is little understanding."

In other green IT news, software start-up CloudApps will today launch a new version of its carbon management application with support for a wider range of carbon reporting standards and regulatory requirements.

The company said its Summer '10 edition would extend the international reach of the application by supporting carbon emissions standards adopted by the International Energy Agency, Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, the US Environmental Protection Agency and the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

The new application will also provide new functionality to help firms report in line with both the UK's Carbon Reduction Commitment and the Carbon Disclosure Project's voluntary reporting requirements.