Following the European lead in regulating the footprint of IT

Despite an absence of defined regulations in Australia akin to EU standards such as the Restriction on Hazardous Substances [RoHS] or the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment [WEEE], vendors are being compelled to adopt eco-friendly practices if they are to compete in the global market.

According to Graeme Reardon, regional sales director A/NZ at Linksys, the RoHS standard impacts international trade as manufacturers outside the EU need to ensure their products are compliant if they are importing products to the region.

“Even though we don’t have anything here right now similar to the RoHS requirement, all of our products are compliant and being driven by European standards because they won’t allow us to sell non-compliant products in the EU,” he said.

Reardon credits the restrictions with accelerating research and development at Linksys in the area of Green IT. He also claimed that the likelihood of other Governments adopting similar standards has spurred the networking vendor to take a Green approach, not only in the development and packaging of its products, but also the energy consumption of its data centres.

“[RoHS] is great from a global perspective because now none of our products contain lead and inevitably other Governments will start to mandate. We’re already starting to see a movement toward those kinds of standards here in Australia,” said Reardon.

The RoHS standard stipulates that new electrical and electronic equipment put on the market must not contain any of the six banned substances: lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, poly-brominated biphenyls (PBB) or polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE), in quantities exceeding maximum concentration values. Currently applying only to Member States of the EU, Mike Hedley, NSW executive officer at AIIA commented that the standard offers several opportunities for the channel to capitalise on the concept of Green IT.

“From a business side there are tremendous opportunities for the IT industry to develop products and solutions,” he said. “We’ve seen a lot of companies grow up in this space.”

However, an opinion remains that Australia is lagging behind in the area of Green IT. Reardon stated that vendors stand to benefit from a local standard and Linksys is eagerly awaiting the Rudd government to follow the European lead.

“We don’t have anything locally, but we would like to back up our claims of being eco-friendly by saying that we comply with the local Australian or A/NZ standards. They simply don’t exist so we have to look to Europe and the US and build the standards into our products,” he said.