Here are some resources gathered lately, mostly about the business of green ecommerce. It has to be said that this is still a very thin area: most of the industry is still in gold rush mode, intent only on soaking up the vast annual growth we're still seeing in ecommerce everywhere (some categories are growing at over 50% per year). Real work on sustainability is happening in IT infrastructure (see IBM's £1B 'Project Big Green') and in logistics). It's a marker for how few good pages there are on sustainable ecommerce that my own blog post on the topic from last week sorts to the top of Google's search results for 'green ecommerce'.
Here's a really fascinating (and already quite influential) report from the US Government's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, snappily titled: Best Practices for Data Centers: Lessons Learned from Benchmarking 22 Data Centers (PDF). Lots of hard data here and evidence of widespread waste, even in the most modern of facilities. Paradoxically, of course, this represents an opportunity for the industry: there are obviously huge cost and efficiency savings available in our current infrastructure if we just get our act together and implement the recommendations of reports like this one.
A UK government-funded research consortium of six universities called Green Logistics. Various shippers, truckers, retailers and government agencies are involved as sponsors and will make use of the data and recommendations produced. Not much here about eCommerce yet (well, nothing, actually). The early focus has obviously been on trucking, packaging, warehousing etc. but I understand that Heriot Watt University, one of the participating institutions, has a research project on green ecommerce under way in its Logistics Research Centre (at the moment there's just some quite out-of-date consumer research).
Ian Barnes is Sustainable Development Manager at Boots. His entertaining presentation (PDF) on green logistics at Boots is on the Green Logistics site as is Alan McKinnon's very useful short history of green logistics research (PDF).
With a big fanfare in September, Tesco's announced - to a pretty sour response form the UK media, it should be said - a £25M endowment for a new Sustainable Consumption Institute at Manchester University. The project doesn't seem to have its own web site yet but keep an eye on the Manchester University web site for news.
And meanwhile, in the real world, a US business called Banyan Commerce, principally concerned with the rather old-fashioned business of EDI but also running datacentres, has announced that customers will in future be able to automatically offset their datacentre capacity via Banyan's partnership with a not-for-profit called Zero Footprint. I expect to see a lot more of this kind of initiative and it makes a lot of sense: offsetting should take place as far upstream as possible and the datacentre - a centralised, managed resource shared by hundreds of businesses - is as good a place as any to get started. Ask your own ISP/datacentre about offsetting your capacity.
Computing Magazine has a feature in this month's Computing Business supplement titled 'The benefits of green IT', which is about sustainable IT infrastructure for businesses. In Computing itself there's an article by Tom Young about the pressure from client companies on IT vendors to provide green solutions and there's now a section of the magazine devoted to green IT issues which you should probably bookmark. I'm bookmarking sustainable ecommerce pages at del.icio.us using the tag 'greenecommerce'. Feel free to do the same and subscribe to the tag's feed for updates.
Pic from IBM.
