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- Key players to involve - Besides the purchasers who specialize in ICT procurement, it is essential to form a team of ICT managers from your organization. If at all possible, have a vendor meeting prior to issuing the RFP to get input from potential vendors.
- Staff training: Basic understanding of environmental life cycle assessment will be helpful but not essential. Staff will not need to know the math, or detail, of conducting one. However, it will be helpful for them to understand how to compare LCA results. For example, the concepts of “functional units” and “system boundaries” are basic to knowing what’s been included in the analysis and what has not, to ensure an “apples to apples” comparison. The American Center for Life Cycle Analysis can be a helpful source of training resources http://www.lcacenter.org/.
- Pair your efforts to reduce GHG footprint of services with internal conservation efforts to reduce unnecessary use of services where possible. For example, encourage employees to clean-out e-mail periodically.
- Address potential barriers / myths. For government, ICT can be one of an organization’s biggest carbon footprint procurement categories because information and communication is such a large part of what government does. Some may erroneously conclude that ICT should then be reduced, in order to lower overall emissions, and more paper should be used because paper doesn’t use electricity in its use phase. This is faulty logic. In most cases, using digital resources is environmentally preferable to creation of paper documents and publications. Use of ICT to decrease use of paper, decrease travel or improve logistics will result in a net carbon footprint reduction.
