Green IT Conference

Green IT conference
Green IT conference, for the first time in Lebanon, was organized by “Formatech”, supported by Microsoft and Green party of Lebanon. Bank Med is the green exclusive sponsor. The conference took place in Universite Saint – Joseph on Wednesday 15th of December .Khalil Shehab Primary School was invited to the conference which was attended by Reine hably and Zeina shehab. A representative of the Minister of the Environment started the conference by encouraging the Lebanese forces to conduct internal procedures to contribute to a better future. Planning and Action are required to achieve an eco friendly environment. People that may help in the internal procedures are UNDP and companies’ assistants. Cost-benefit analysis should dominate the economical system of any company. Bank Med offers BM credit cards to finance environmental projects. Mr.Charbel Nakhle from “Formatech”sheded the light on global warming and Corporate Social Responsibility concepts. According to researchers, the causes of the global warming are diverse. Some believe that the main cause goes to the high emissions of carbon di-oxide CO2; others believe that the sun is getting hotter and the remaining researchers believe that the global warming is caused in part by the greenhouse effect that results in spreading many gases such as: CO2-CH4-N2O-HFC3. Global warming is highly persistent when high emissions of CO2 are combined with water vaporization. The effects of global warming are erosion, loss of wetlands and fresh water drinking supplies. Another environmental threat is the increase in sea level due to absence of effective damns. Half of the world’s population lies along coasts so this problem targets a large audience. Mr.Nakhle introduced the role of Green IT in driving an efficient, modern business, encouraging large energy and cost savings. Green computing refers to environmental sustainable computing .Greening your computer equipments is a low risk. Computer energy is often wasted when leaving computer on when not in use. The fan, CPU and screen savers consume power. Some toxic materials found in the electronic advices are lead, mercury and cadmium. These substances when thrown in the garbage where they will be burned will result in many negative and mortal consequences. The lead used in soldering printed circuit boars and other components cause damage to the central and peripheral brain. The mercury spreads out in water transforming to methylated mercury leading to a chronic brain damage. According to researches, in 2010 new users of computers in china and India are more than 178,000,000 and 80,000,000 respectively. This dramatic increase should be incorporated by IT eco-friendly green solutions:
1-Re-use of the PCs by giving them to Mosques, churches and libraries
2-Refurbish: change the memory and the CPU to be able to use the computer for a longer time
3-Recycling : plastic is found all over the parts of the computer
4-video conferencing to reduce travel costs
5-using LCD projector to reduce paper waste.
6-Use power saver mode
Here are some Go Green challenges:
1-charge your business units for their energy usage. Put a plafond to drive down the energy usage and requirements.
2-Google Desktop gadget for XP and vista that optimizes your power setting
3-Data center redesign
4-Cooling through dynamic fresh air
5-Using hardware virtualization .Decrease the number of physical servers by having virtual servers and this result in decreasing servers’ heat, maintenance and environmental consumption
Then MR. Ghassan chahine announced Microsoft commitment to software and technology that help people and organizations all over the world to improve the environment. Microsoft goal is to reduce the impact of their operations and products, and to be a leader in environmental responsibility.
What Microsoft is doing?
1-reduce the 3% of energy consumed by software driven devices
2-accelerate researches
3-partner with leading environmental companies
4-Decrease carbon footprint
5-invest to decrease environmental impacts
6-Increase ICT to save energy use
7-reduce and monitor the CO2 emissions from: data centers, real estate infrastructure and travel
Then there was a listing of Microsoft advanced environmental monitor and control:
1-Re-inventing the data center
2-Air side economization \Air ventilation
3- Microsoft cloud computing
4-Window 7 already built to reduce energy of ICT
5-Eye on earth (global observatory for environmental factors where people can check the quality of air and water)
6-Microsoft Hohm where citizens can check the impact on the environment and be recommended to buy a solar water heat
7- Microsoft International project “Imagine cup”. In Lebanon, USEK University won during the project competition and it is a green university for the coming 10 years. After the project, there is a room in the university that measures the CO2 emissions.
Finally, Mr.philippe skaff introduced the green party of Lebanon: ‘’الحزب الخضر اللبناني “as a party that cares about the environmental prosperity and introduced briefly a demo of the Beirut Green River project .
This project tend to clean Beirut River and harvest all around it green spaces that will be surrounded by huge gardens, parks, buildings and restaurants. This project needs to be funded by the government, municipalities and the wealthy investors.