IT leaders should be carbon information leaders, too

Not only will risk adverse

Not only will risk adverse CIOs be leery of taking on this role, but also educated CIOs who recognize the "crisis" of man made global warming / climate change for the hoax that it is.

>>Eliminate personal

>>Eliminate personal printers from offices and cubes.<<

I've seen this one many times, and it's treated almost like an article of faith. However, I have never seen a really good justification for this sweeping generalization.

There are some good reasons for using more smaller printers than a few really big ones.

Firstly, electronic data is NOT the only data that needs to be kept private. If you are going to force people who print this stuff to print to shared printers that are in a space shared by people who should not have access to that information, then you had better spring for the really high end printers and the lock boxes to allow people to literally lock their documents away.

Secondly, printer placement can have a huge impact on workflow issues. For instance, some of our staff run dozens of jobs each day, and need the output for each one right away - they are actually using and working with these print outs rather than just filing them away. If someone needs exercise, then walking down the hall 20 times a day might be good for them. But you can be sure that it's not doing much good for the efficiency. And, if those papers need to be handed to someone who is sitting in your office (or even by your cubicle) then having to walk away from your desk for more than a minute presents some problems that I hope are obvious.

In terms of carbon footprint, as well, there are some advantages. The bigger - and more expensive - a piece of equipment is, the easier it is to replace. So, with smaller, less expensive equipment, you can replace any given item sooner. And, it lets you replace a large chink of energy guzzling equipment piecemeal, but starting *immediately* so that you can immediately start reducing energy use, rather than having to wait a longer time to get started.

The other thing is that today, most printers don't take up that much energy when not in use, but many of the smaller printers do take less power to print a few pages than the bigger printers. So, having a large number of smaller printers is NOT as energy consuming as it used to be. Depending on usage patterns, and how good your big printer is on printing power vs the smaller printer, it's far from obvious that the centralized approach is really that much more energy efficient.