Public Sector Facing the Regulatory Heat on Green

Introduction

In our increasingly eco-conscious society, front-line public sector organizations at all levels are finding themselves under pressure to display green credentials and to show how they are identifying and reducing wasteful practices. This is especially true given public organisations are major consumers in areas like Europe, Africa and the Middle East.  

While operating sustainably is undoubtedly a key objective for public organizations, the reality of today’s economic climate means that budgets are being slashed across the board and acting sustainably can easily be de-prioritized.  But economic downturn or not, regulatory pressure is increasing globally, placing additional pressures on public sector bodies to make sustainability a higher priority.

‘Green’ public procurement

Using taxpayer’s money to source products is always going to be an area of intense scrutiny and the green angle is no exception.  For public sector bodies, one of the key mechanisms for achieving their emission reduction targets is via specific policy frameworks dictated by regional governments or legislators.  In the EU, for example, the public sector is abiding by the Green Public Procurement (GPP), a policy framework included in the recently-announced EU’s Public Procurement Directives.  This provides a detailed—and fairly stringent—set of rules established at both national and European level that ensure that public organizations source products and services that offer the best possible environmental value.  Countries in other regions are starting to following similar frameworks and principles.

Government policy around the world is getting more detailed about making recommendations for public sector organizations to achieve green procurement targets.  These include:

• Drawing up clear and precise technical specifications for procurement, using environmental factors where possible

• Choosing a green title to communicate an organization’s policy to the outside world, ensuring optimum transparency for potential suppliers or service providers, and for the citizens being served

• Establishing selection criteria for green procurement. Where appropriate, this should involve including environmental criteria to prove technical capacity to perform contracts; and telling potential suppliers, service providers or contractors that they can use environmental management schemes and declarations to prove compliance with the criteria

• Using contract performance clauses as a way of setting additional environmental conditions in contracts. This can include insisting on environment-friendly transport methods

• Considering which products or services are the most suitable on the basis both of their environmental impact and factors such as the information available to organizations, what products are on the market, technologies available, costs and visibility

• Establishing award criteria: where the criteria of the ‘economically most advantageous tender’ is chosen, inserting relevant environmental criteria either as a benchmark to compare green offers with each other (in the case where the technical specifications define the contract as being green)

Environmental policies are only just beginning; individual states across EMEA are also focusing heavily on sustainability with local and national compliance measures.  With this pressure, the move to sustainability has become a matter of urgency for the public sector.

Green IT and green printing

In the above context, all eyes are on ICT products and services given the energy consumption usually associated with IT.  In government policy frameworks, improvements in office IT equipment, and printing in particular, have been identified as making a significant contribution to reducing an organisation’s carbon footprint. Broadly speaking, policy recommendations around printing tend to include:

•    Centralizing printing fleets and systems
•    Using electronic templates as corporate stationery
•    Installing multifunctional devices or printers with duplex function
•    Training users on the amounts of paper used and the possible savings
•    Minimizing printing waste, making maximum use of electronic/digital workflows

The business case for sustainability

The above solutions seem straightforward enough, but sustainability practice in public sector IT needs to be based on a fundamental rethink of the way public sector organizations procure and deploy IT.

Firstly, organizations need to better and more consistently track IT costs, many of which remain hidden or unmeasured.  Take printing as an example. According to a recent study, for every euro spent actually printing a document, an organization spends another €9 on print management. The hidden costs include facilities expenses, user time, document management and IT support. Because they are not set against imaging and printing, the true cost of print fleets—its total cost of ownership, or TCO—is often not understood. The same is true for environmental impact.

Secondly, IT in the public sector tends to evolve tactically rather than strategically.  Printing is again a relevant example.  Devices like printers are often added to the network in response to immediate needs, rather than in response to an overarching plan.  The result tends to be an infrastructure that is fragmented both technically, with no single set of tools being used to centrally manage all devices, and administratively, with different cost centres responsible for different parts of the IT operation.  As one solution to this trend, many organizations are turning to IT outsourcing and managed IT environments.  In printing, this involves the deployment of Managed Print Services (MPS)—one of the fastest growing business segment in enterprise printing.

Thirdly, and directly related to the above, the purchasing of IT hardware in public sector organizations often gives greater weight to the price of hardware than to its long-term running costs.  This can lead not only to a higher total cost of ownership (TCO) but also greater consumption of resources.  Printing again presents a clear example, where a short-term view of hardware costs usually involves greater than necessary consumption of paper, print supplies and, crucially, energy.  To solve this, CIOs in public organizations need to consider the full lifecycle of IT products—from production through to use and disposal.  

Lastly, amongst public sector organizations there is often little knowledge of how IT decision-makers can go about measuring and assessing the environmental impact of their infrastructure.  Assessment and measurement remain critical to demystifying ‘green’ in the eyes of public sector CIOs and facilitating implementation: IT decision-makers need to know where they stand with regards to sustainability and what criteria to judge that by; and they need to tie verifiable metrics and measurement to green implementation.

Making a difference

One important point to highlight, particularly in these straitened economic times, is that the factors that make a print infrastructure environmentally inefficient also make it more expensive than it should be. Environmental action is not a luxury limited to sustainability; it is a direct and immediate way of saving taxpayers’ money and making your budget go further.

Organizations—whether public or not—are increasingly finding that green practice also means sound financial practice.  For public sector organizations, the current economic climate provides even greater incentive for organizations to go green.  Saving energy, paper and supplies helps to save the planet—but it also helps the bottom line.  Unless the inherent inefficiency of IT setups are addressed, the move to a more sustainable IT environment in the public sector will be all but impossible.