Welcome To SusteIT

The SusteIT (Sustainable IT in Tertiary Education) initiative aims to:

• Highlight, and stimulate take-up of, opportunities to minimise the environmental footprint, and maximise social benefits, associated with ICT use and applications in further and higher education;
• Develop the knowledge base about ICT-related environmental and social impacts; and
• Develop a vision of UK higher education as a world leader in sustainable ICT, e.g. through development of 'zero carbon data centres' and intelligent buildings.   

It builds on over a decade's research by HEEPI co-director Peter James and colleagues on sustainable ICT, mainly in collaboration with SustainIT, a unit of the charity, UK CEED (see www.ukceed.org). Much of the work has been on the sustainability impacts of ICT applications such as e-business, flexible working and remote collaboration.  This resulted in Peter's membership of recent EU Expert Groups on ICT and Energy Efficiency, and Environmental Technologies.

SusteIT began in 2008, when HEEPI and SustainIT were jointly funded by JISC (the Joint Information Services Committee, which provides ICT support to UK further and higher education) to prepare a strategic review of sustainable ICT in the sector. Since the original study's completion in early 2009, SusteIT have had a number of JISC-funded follow on activities including: 

• Green In Silico - Making Scientific Computing More Sustainable - on the increasing use of IT in science and research laboratories
• Virtually Sustainable - on videoconferencing (VC) and other virtual meeting technologies as a means of reducing travel-related energy and carbon in universities
• Responsible Energy Costs in Universities and Colleges (RECSO) - which examines how IT departments can best be incentivised to place greater emphasis on reducing the energy use associated with their activities 
• Display Energy for Laboratory Tracking and Action (DELTA) - which is using ICT technologies to display ventilation-related energy use in fume cupboards, and developing a road map of 'smart laboratory' buildings in the future. 

The outputs from all SusteIT activities can be seen in the Events - Past Presentations; News; Publications; and Resources and Tools sections of this site.