WEEE! No, Small Business Solutions hasn't gone completely juvenile, it's just that new legislation will shortly be upon us. The Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive. It aims to increase the recycling and recovery of waste equipment, and is expected to become European law next year.
Meanwhile, a working paper called the Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive, which has yet to be adopted by the EU, will aim to push manufacturers into designing systems so that they can be managed in an environmentally sensitive manner throughout their life.
All of which sounds laudable, but, for most of us, the issue of whether we then examine our own technology for compliance with any IT issues remains unaddressed. Steve Manners, who heads the UK Professionals forum on CompuServe, confirms this. "I am not aware of even thinking about what I would consider green issues," he says, and he buys computers often. "I worry about speed, RAM, hard disk space, graphics and so on."
Others bear this out. Brian Higton, director of home worker association the TCA, supplies IT kit to other small businesses. "Environmental considerations are not at the top of the list of equipment selection criteria," he says.
There are, however, various bits and pieces you can check in the design of IT systems to make sure they are not wildly damaging to our planet. First, if the system is relatively new, the manufacturer will already be building green elements in. Several manufacturers pride themselves on making casings that snap into place rather than using rivets, and almost all will use as much recycled material as is feasible. Power consumption is low on most IT systems and has been so for many years.
As long as a company still owns a computer, assuming it does sensible things, like turning it off when it's not in use and using power saving options when the system is idle, the chances are that its environmental credentials will be pretty reasonable. Unfortunately, some of the uses to which systems are put are less than helpful - how many times, for example, has an employee in a given company printed off an email or web page they could already see so that they could carry it around with them? "Computers have actually created more paperwork," comments Jon Newlyn, sales director of Attachmate. "More trees are being felled to cater for them."
Newlyn suggests that some of the computers being bought are unnecessary. 'You could ask yourself whether some people, particularly on the road, could work instead with a PDA [personal digital assistant - essentially a glorified organiser, but more advanced models now have spreadsheets, word processing and other functions]" PDAs are rarely considered as alternatives to desktop computers, but as their capability increases there are fewer logical reasons why not.
The real damage a computer can do to the environment starts at the end of its useful life. "Few purchasers seem to consider how their obsolete equipment should be properly disposed of," says Higton. "This is despite the fact that there are some good companies that will take away redundant equipment for refurbishment and resale or environmentally acceptable disposal."
It is in order to combat this level of environmental damage that the European Commission has implemented WEEE and EEE. Claire Snow, director of the Industry Council for Electronic Equipment Recycling (ICER), stresses that this will put the onus on the designer and builder of the system rather than the buyer. That is easy enough if the system builder is a large company, but here the smaller manufacturer will need to start addressing the issues sooner rather than later: "It will mean a lot of research and auditing of suppliers," says Snow, "and smaller businesses won't have the resources." Presumably starting early will help.
Once that legislation comes into effect, the customer will not have to concern themselves with the disposal of their system when it is no longer any use as it will be the manufacturer's responsibility.
In the meantime, there are ways of reducing the environmental impact of a dead system, many of which involve extending its life by opting to buy something that can be expanded rather than replaced.
This means checking for expansion slots for extra hard disk space and for extra memory as the demand increases, and for the most up-to-date connections so that you'll be able to add the latest scanners, printers and other gadgets as and when you need to. It probably means spending more money than you'd hoped; basic systems, although fine for today's tasks, are likely to show their limitations more quickly than their costlier counterparts.
The other thing that can be done is simply to find a second user for old systems. Charities regularly appeal for redundant computers and employees will often happily buy them, at reduced prices, for their own home use. The thing to watch out for when arranging this is the software. Normally the licence will have been assigned to the original buyer and will not be transferable. As long as it's made clear that the new owner will have to supply all their own software, they should be happy enough - until they find that some new systems with the software preloaded are cheaper than the purchase price of the individual programs. If someone is planning to do something about this, it's a well-kept secret so far.
