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5: The Magic of “Incentive”—The Role of Electric Utilities 83

than 95 percent of the material in old servers and other IT equipment.
More than 99.9 percent of the parts in today’s mainframes are recyclable.
Recycling PCs, servers, and other IT equipment has never been a huge pri-
ority for U.S. businesses. Servers are designed with the total product life cycle
in mind. But some companies are finding a new motivation: security. With
today’s rising concerns about identity theft and data breaches, companies
need to know there’s no sensitive data left on machines before they’re trashed
or recycled. That concern led Union Bank of California to more secure dis-
posal that also proved to be greener. The bank hires a company called
Intechra that erases data from drives and removes asset tags and other forms
of corporate identification and then refurbishes this equipment for resale or
grinds them up to recycle the material. None of it goes into a landfill. Union
Bank pays $20 to $30 per PC for disposal and gets back 50 percent to 60 per-
cent of any resale value, which is $200 to $300 on high-end notebooks and
$50 on desktop PCs. Without this erasure process and resale, the bank states
that they’d have to have an internal team scrub the old systems. IBM has a
facility of more 300,000 square feet in Endicott, New York, devoted to recy-
cling of IT equipment. There, IT equipment disk drives are ground up and
ptg
precious metals recovered as part of the normal end-of-life processes.

Telecommuting
IT can directly help reduce greenhouse gases if this reduction enables
workers to telecommute. For instance, since 2001, the federal government
has required agencies to have a formal policy to let eligible workers telecom-
mute, but many have been slow to act, often because managers aren’t sure
how to deal with remote reports. At Sun, 14,219 employees work from home
two days a week, and 2,800 work from home three to five days a week. Some
use drop-in centers closer to home that save an average of 90 minutes in com-
mute time. About 40 percent of employees use the telecommuting program
to some extent. That saves 6,660 office seats, cutting Sun’s real estate costs by
$63 million in the last fiscal year. Reduced commuting by Sun workers
resulted in an estimated drop of 29,000 tons of CO2 emissions. Gartner esti-
mates that 12.6 million U.S. workers were telecommuters in 2007 for more
than eight hours a week. Gartner believes that number will have increased
just 3 percent in 2008. Not exactly on pace to save the planet! The slow
adoption of this type of energy-saving process is often the reality of corporate
green initiatives.