Ok I am feeling in a bit of a Bob Geldolf/Al Gore inspired mood today after catching a documentary on TV that talked about the design approach of “Cradle to Cradle” or C2C. Yes I know, this is a touchy subject for me, I work for an Airline and although I work for an airline my employer does have an awareness of sustainability.

C2C is interesting and brings up many pondering thoughts relevant to our current working world of the typical IT Landscape. C2C uses a design methodology that ensures that the item being designed is built with components and material that has a real recycling and reuse capability. You may think that programs such as the WEEE directive will take away your end of life hardware components, recycle them and then end up in a 12-18 month period as a new hardware component, but it appears not. WEEE Recycled items such hardware components experiences severe degradation and have a limited amount of reuse capability when they are recycled in this process, I would imagine this is the case for a large percentage of anything that is generally recycled.

So where am I going with this? The reality is this (unless I am missing something in the industry), the hardware within our IT landscapes is designed with very little consideration for initiatives such as a C2C methodology approach and has been this way inclined since the industrial revolution of IT began, we have removed a small proportion of our guilt factor when it comes to disposing of old hardware but it certainly isn’t a silver bullet. So with this thought in mind the main questions I have to IT Vendors are as follows;

• When will you begin to design your portfolio offerings with a design methodology that we see within examples such as C2C?
• When will the industry be able to buy Infrastructure that is infinite future generation compatible?

These Two questions probably indicates what I am getting at here…I want to see radical change in how my IT Infrastructure is designed. Most technology today basically lasts for Five years, most of which I would like to see radical transformation and this Infrastructure to be designed in a C2C fashion so it can reduce;

• The excessive volume of longer term environmental damage due to apparent loss of material quality in the Recycling process,
• Wasted cost to both the customer and also I expect the vendor with introductions of new generation of Hardware infrastructure
• Refresh programs that cost organisations and effect the environment in also indirect areas such as people and implementation costs,
• Removal of EOL or “Wear and Tear”, although not as prevalent in the Datacentre infrastructure landscape in the desktop space this is immensely problematic.

I am not aware that hardware vendors like Dell, EMC, HP and Netapp are designing infrastructure product offerings to meet a C2C Criteria, if you are then please comment. Lets just hope that for our future generations sake that we see a sharp radical volume of R and D from top tier organisations going into designing technology portfolio that is geared towards a C2C methodology for everyones benefit (including them). It is only a matter of time before we see yet another change in how IT sustainability rules are enforced which I am sure will be beneficial but will it be beneficial to actually make considerable amounts of difference to the planet that we all live and depend upon?