Green IT

Managing our impact

With approximately 95 000 workstations and around 5 000 servers, Unilever's global IT operations consume a sizeable amount of energy. As energy costs rise, more efficient IT management makes business and environmental sense by reducing operating costs and greenhouse gas emissions.  

Unilever's Green IT strategy aims to reduce the environmental impact of our IT operations and use technology to help us achieve our wider sustainability goals. As well as helping to reduce our carbon footprint, IT can improve work–life balance through new technologies such as video- and web-conferencing that remove the need for travel.

Maximising the efficiency of our data centres

Unilever's servers require significant amounts of energy to power and cool them. Servers are located at individual Unilever sites or clustered in dedicated facilities known as data centres. For example, our two major European data centres located in the UK house over 2 500 servers.

Virtualisation technology allows multiple operating systems, applications and databases to be installed on a single server. This makes more efficient use of the server's capabilities, increasing the number of applications they can run while delivering significant reductions in energy consumption.

We have incorporated this in SOLAR, our two-year programme established in 2008 to consolidate our IT infrastructure across Europe and reduce the time and effort needed to manage our global IT services. Alongside improvements to storage capabilities, virtualisation technology is simplifying our IT facilities by consolidating data centres and allowing us to explore new technologies to improve the user experience. We expect the improvements to reduce IT operating costs by up to €6 million a year in Europe alone. We are also working with Hewlett Packard and IBM to include environmental standards in future hardware.

Removing outdated and under-used applications and replacing older equipment with more efficient models have reduced the amount of hardware in our UK data centres by 25%. By the end of 2008, 684 country-based servers had been decommissioned, saving an estimated 2 059 tonnes of CO2 emissions. At the same time, demand on our data centres has increased only by a fraction.

Reducing the impact of personal computing

As well as educating our workforce to switch off and power down unused PCs, we are exploring ways to shut down PCs and monitors automatically at scheduled times or if they are inactive for a long period. Low-energy monitors are being phased in and alternatives to the traditional PC, such as low-energy terminal computers, are being explored.

Energy use has been further reduced by replacing hundreds of fax machines, scanners and printers with multifunction devices. A double-sided printing policy is in place to reduce the amount of paper consumed and wasted.

New ways of working: how IT supports our Vitality Mission

Telepresence is Unilever's state-of-the-art audio and video conferencing technology that enables employees from around the world to work together as if they were in the same room. The technology has improved work/life balance for many of our employees by removing the need to travel long distances, reducing the associated risks of sickness and fatigue. It is available at eight sites in Brazil, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Singapore, Thailand, the UK and the US, with plans in place to extend it to 50 sites by the end of 2009.

It has also helped Unilever reduce its carbon footprint, cutting carbon emissions by an estimated 1 700 tonnes since September 2007, and saving an estimated €5 million in travel costs. By the end of 2008, an estimated 640 long haul and 470 short haul flights were avoided by using the technology.

We are also increasing the use of other technologies such as web conferencing to host meetings and presentations over the internet, further reducing the need for travel. An estimated 70 000 virtual meetings were held during 2008 with between three and four participants at each meeting. With over 40 000 employees using the technology, savings on travel costs, CO2 reductions and improved work/life balance are significant.

Measurement

We are benchmarking our performance against other organisations using the Gartner ICT (Information and Communications Technology) scorecard. The scorecard helps organisations address their environmental responsibilities while maintaining or improving IT costs and services.

Working with others 

We are members of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a partnership that brings together industry, government, conservation, and consumer organisations in setting ambitious targets for energy-efficient computing. The Initiative's goal is to reduce global CO2 emissions from computers by 49 million tonnes per year by 2010, which is equivalent to the annual emissions of 11 million cars or up to 20 coal-fired power stations.