Sustainable IT

IT Services are committed to supporting the University's Birmingham 2030 strategic goal to tackle global sustainability challenges.

We're working with our IT partners and suppliers to reduce our overall operational consumption of energy and related carbon emissions as well as the environmental impact of our IT equipment. 

Reducing our environmental impact

We're working with our suppliers to reduce the environmental impact and offset all of the carbon created by your computer for its entire lifecycle.

  • To help offset our carbon footprint, we contribute towards carbon reducing environmental projects in developing countries around the world. 
  • All of our end-of-life IT equipment is recycled, none of it goes to landfill. 
  • A tree is planted for every set of IT waste collected.
  • We only use environmentally conscious suppliers.
  • Our standard IT products are Energy Star compliant and must meet strict energy efficiency criteria.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
  • All of our IT equipment is shipped using bamboo and bagasse, reducing packaging size and increasing transportation efficiency by 6.7%.

Reducing our carbon emissions

We're reducing our overall operational consumption of energy and related carbon emissions by migrating more of our services to the cloud.

  • We’ve chosen Microsoft Azure as our cloud provider, so we benefit from their investment in world leading sustainable technology.

  • Microsoft are actively working to reduce the climate impact of their business and are committed to carbon neutral operations and purchasing renewable electricity.
  • The Azure Cloud benefits from greater operational, equipment and infrastructure efficiency making us more energy efficient than traditional on-premise enterprise data centres.
  • ​​​​​Hosting our Microsoft services in the Cloud makes us between 72% and 98% more carbon efficient.

 

Sustainable HPC computing

High-performance computing (HPC) requires a lot of cooling. Our HPC data centre has been designed to provide greater efficiency and sustainability.

  • Our research data centre is the first HE data centre in the UK to use a state-of-the-art direct to node water-cooling system, which reduces our cooling energy usage by 83%.

  • Our research data centre also has a ‘green’ roof to help maintain ecological diversity and environmental sustainability.

  • Our supplier delivers pre-assembled 'rack-shipped systems' to save on packaging. This amounts to a saving of 47kg of cardboard and 80 meters of wood per rack.

  • We're reducing the use of old, inefficient equipment and underused resources and run an intelligent scheduling system to improve energy efficiency.

Staff and students can find out more about how we're making IT more sustainable at our IT Hub.