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I n t r o d u c t i o n n t r o d u c t i o n xxv xxv

Part I: Trends and Reasons to Go Green

• Chapter 1: Overview and Issues This chapter sets the stage to explain why IT
departments are having such a deleterious effect on the environment. We examine
computers—from cradle to grave—and show you how they impact the environment,
from poor use to their ultimate end. This is a new perspective on IT buying. Before we
thought about purchasing computers in terms of the receiving dock to the dumpster.
Now we must consider the full life cycle, from production through recycling.
We’ll also talk about your organization and how to determine what sort of impact
you’re having on the environment. In the end, we’ll show how you can save money
by going green.
• Chapter 2: Current Initiatives and Standards Although it’s early in the process of
governing bodies creating standards and laws about e-waste, the world knows well
enough that electronics make an impact. It wasn’t as much of a deal 20 or 30 years
ago—before there was a computer on every horizontal surface. But now it is a big
deal. To ameliorate those problems, governments and organizations around the
world have initiatives in place that will help reduce the impact of electronic waste.
This chapter talks about some of the initiatives that aim to lessen IT impact.

Part II: Consumption Issues
• Chapter 3: Minimizing Power Usage You probably don’t see your datacenter’s
power bill. If you did, it might shock you (no pun intended) to see how much power
you consume. Datacenters and IT departments use a lot of energy. This chapter
shows how you can lessen the amount of power you use. If you are looking at a place
to pay for your Green IT initiatives, this is likely it.
• Chapter 4: Cooling You could probably hang meat in any datacenter you walked
into. Because datacenters generate a lot of heat (largely from inefficient power
supplies), we tend to crank up the air conditioning to cool things down. Here again
is a huge expense. Chapter 4 talks about alternatives for cooling your datacenter,
and how you can do so without using more than you need.

Part III: What You Can Do

• Chapter 5: Changing the Way We Work Although this book focuses mainly on
technology and its environmental impacts, there are some other measures you can
take—either on the part of your whole company in general, or your IT department
in particular—that can lessen your organization’s impact on the planet. This chapter
shows you what sorts of things you can do to change your business processes for
the better. If you think change is easy when a compelling and obvious path to do the
right thing is presented, then you might not remember the challenges the U.S. faced
(and lost) when trying to adopt the metric system in the early 1980s.
• Chapter 6: Going Paperless We generate a lot of paper, and we don’t need to. True,
we like holding paper in our hands, but, again, you will save money if you reduce
the amount of paper you use—and you’ll also save trees. It has been estimated
that the cost of handling and processing paper is 31 times that of the paper itself.