Power usage, scale and scope is questionable. Larger providers have a greater energy use

Working from home over the internet stops you travelling and reducing your footprint

Edgehill virtualisation of servers: fewer actual PCs so reduce power - also smaller steps like screensaver shorter timeout, go to standby rather than screensaver

Landfill of old servers and desktops, look at upgrading to Vista which means a huge hardware turnover. Upgrade servers for upgrade's sake - contracts.

Is Windows Vista processing-intensive in order to deliberately shift more hardware? Universities are always getting new students and they bring the latest hardware with them, so it has to be supported, so we need to have it inside the University.

One Laptop Per child (OLPC), green, human-powered by footpump

Apple's use of toxic elements in component usage recent controversy with Friends of the Earth

WEEE electronic disposal of all sorts. Computers are hazardous waste.

Disposal is a problem. Shipping to China can be economical because we get stuff here and ship it back in the same boxes, but then how do they dispose of it?

People move things to the web because they think it should be better and new, but it's not always, let alone practical. Printing stuff is a huge waste, there's no smart printing so you get a lot of stuff that you don't necessarily want.

Getting new servers without FPUs are more energy-efficient.

Cultural issues about using thin clients - although this would reduce the environmental impact of desktop PCs - they have a much longer lifecycle, something like 8 years or so opposed to the three year desktop upgrade.

Departmental control of servers could be reduced by centralisation but it's a hard political problem.

Estates pay or the electricity, so depts. have no motivation to switch to power saving machines.

Heating from machine rooms into the buldings, problems with extractions? Got to be an efficent re-use of heat power. Bath turned this off.

Community - do we provide another tools to work from home? What about all departments? Seems to be OK for IT workers. Is the green thing a red herring? Your own home has its electricity and lights etc. which would otherwise be shared at the office.

Pervasive computer use means a 24/7 computer power. All tech devices need chargers, etc. and a lot of people just leave them plugged in and turned on all the time.

Internet can't possibly be a green technology - there's no true offsetting - it's only the power generation that we can really save on so how can we improve there?.

Eco-friendly hosting services.

Are we buying more stuff because it's online, but then you're not travelling in to town go actual shopping.

Tesco delivery -

Supermarkets have started experimenting to use electric powered-trucks, converting all old milk float factories to produce them.

Video conferencing rather than travelling? Still not very popular, especially for larger events - still not really very good.

What would we be doing if the internet wasn't here? It's an enabler for things that wouldn't exist without it, so is it worth it anyway?

Does the long-tail enabling of the internet means that there's more demand and consumption or has it been displaced from somewhere else?

eBay is an enabler of extra sales so re-use on that scale is great.

Digital music purchases mean fewer CDs thrown away but does this offset the purchase of digital devices?

Can institutions influence the 24/7 expectations/gg use by having nightly downtime which makes people expect it and start doing it themselves?

Measurement is the problem. AMEE is aproject to help measure this and is installable inside institutions.