An interesting link I ran across, it appears to be an environmental checklist by the chief technical officer for the city of Seattle. I find it reassuring that it even exists! It covers goes over how to make environmentally sensitive IT purchases, and has a sort of checklist for effective purchasing, including energy efficiency, toxic materials, percentage of recycled material, as well as how to deal with the computer waste.
Of course, this is a government agency (presumably) asking these questions, and one could argue whether a company driven purely by profit motive would have what seems to be a very reasonable set of criteria.
I can certainly imagine some change taking place if a few relatively large companies had this same set of criteria in their IT departments.
And imagine how much impact it would have if every city in North America and every university had such a list!
Well, having a list is a good start.. but often times the company / organization is required by law to have that list… but not necessarily to do anything with it. At the moment there are many “lists” floating around out there and not doing much good. let’s get moving on this, there needs to be a change!