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During the past couple years, it has become fashionable for companies to focus on being environmentally friendly or “green.” New research about global warming, and a revived focus on Earth-friendly products and services on the part of consumers, is driving this trend.

 

Encouraged by customers to examine the impact of their operations on the environment (or “carbon footprint”) many businesses are finding that going green can actually save money over the long term. Being green has changed from a moral obligation to a smart business practice.

 

IP telephony and IP presence solutions provider Mitel (News - Alert) definitely is taking the green movement seriously. In fact, for the past eight years the company has made a variety of efforts to reduce its carbon footprint. This ranges from becoming ISO 14001 certified toincorporating environmental considerations such as power consumption and the percentage of product components which are recyclable into design requirements. Mitel’s products also are compliant with two European environmental standards: Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE) and Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (ROHS).

 

 

Vani Naidoo, solutions marketing manager at Mitel, explained that ISO 14001 is a set of environmental standards managed by the International Standards Organization. To be compliant, a company must have an environmental management policy in place and submit to annual audits from an independent third party. The 14001 standards include everything from product design to end-of-life recycling.

 

Once certified as ISO 14001-compliant, companies must show each year that they’re making continuous improvements to their processes. In Mitel’s case, this ongoing compliance has involved lower-emission vehicles for the company’s fleet, a more energy-efficient HVAC system in its facilities, new lighting, and stepped-up composting of food waste from company cafeterias. Next steps for the company include recycling hand towels in the washrooms.

 

Behind the scenes, in other words, Mitel is working hard to be green. It is also focusing on the greenness of its products, primarily in the area of energy efficiency for the phones and switches it manufactures. This has become increasingly important as companies like Wal-Mart, Costco, The Body Shop and Green Mountain Coffee have stepped up their own “green” efforts and are now looking to vendors, including those like Mitel that sell telephony products, to do the same.

 

 

Alan Walsh, also a solutions marketing manager at Mitel, told TMCnet that Mitel products are designed to be energy efficient, a mandate the company gave its engineers from the get-go. Although this involves using more expensive power supplies, the cost savings in electricity result in a competitive edge for Mitel, especially now that the marketplace is focused so much on the environmental impact of doing business.

 

“Engineers are a group that energy efficiency tends to resonate with—efficiencies and trying to get best and most out of the product,” Walsh said. “It's amazing the ideas they have for ways to expand upon the energy efficiency we've already achieved.”

 

Naidoo noted that there is a lot of talk about the energy usage at data centers, but not so much about the electricity that business phones consume. But energy-efficient phones can have a positive ripple effect on the carbon footprint of both businesses and the data centers that serve them.

 

“If you lower power consumption on the individual phone sets that means more phones can be put on a Power Over Ethernet (POE) switch,” Naidoo explained. “That means you're taking up less space, power and cooling resources at the data center.”

 

 

Helping companies operate in a more green way is not just a matter of installing energy-efficient phones, though. Mitel’s IP communications solutions also help companies reduce their carbon footprints by enabling telecommuting and other practices that lighten environmental impacts.

 

Walsh recalled, for example, an ROI analysis he prepared for Wild Oats. He noticed that the company placed a major focus on the environmental friendliness of its corporate practices, so he built that into his report by calculating how much C02 emissions could be reduced by enabling employees to work from home one day a week using Mitel’s teleworker phones.

 

“It really resonated with them,” Walsh said. “That was one of the reasons they chose Mitel—they felt we really understood their corporate culture.”

 

Many of Mitel’s solutions enable employees to collaborate and conduct voice or videoconferences with company employees in geographically dispersed areas instead of traveling to see them in person, thereby reduce the carbon footprint. Mitel Your Assistant and Mitel® Live Business Gateway (News - Alert) are two examples. These two solutions enable online file sharing and videoconferencing, eliminating the need for air travel.

 

“Live Business Gateway is Mitel's interaction with Microsoft (News - Alert) Live Communications Server and Office Communications Server,” explained Walsh. “Mitel brings the voice to those tools.”

 

Using Live Business Gateway, users can easily check to see if someone is available, a very nice feature when trying to reach a colleague located on another time zone or even across the building. If the recipient is available, a collaboration session can be set up via the Web, allowing both parties to edit a document simultaneously.

 

Walsh noted that this type of remote, internal collaboration is especially vital to reducing the carbon footprint of business operations since there are other functions that may be less amenable to the more obvious tactics for going green.

 

“Customer meetings are never going to stop,” he said. “Oftentimes you can't get beyond face-to-face meetings. But companies do a lot of internal meetings as well.”

 

Adopting green practices as a way to help save money and save the environment is not reserved for the corporate sector. Schools and universities, too, are looking to technology as way to lower energy consumption and its associated costs.

 

This is especially true, Naidoo said, in the K-12 education market which is extremely restrained in terms of funding.

 

“K-12 schools don't have a lot of money, so they're constantly looking for operational efficiencies,” she said. “There's a new movement toward ‘green schools’ in an effort to reduce energy consumption.”

 

Naidoo said on average K-12 schools spend about $150 per year per student on energy. Some schools are running out of money to pay for heating and lighting, a trend driving demand for products that consume less energy.

 

Cost-savings from energy efficiency is also appealing to higher-education institutions. Several hundred universities and colleges in the U.S. recently signed on to the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment that dictates, among other things, establishing “carbon neutral” learning institutions.

 

“Part of that initiative involves looking at all the technology options available to help,” Naidoo said. “This could mean distance learning classes using video and audio conferencing and collaboration.”

 

When consumers think of “green,” often the first thing that comes to mind is recycling. Mitel has put a lot of effort into developing products that use less energy and help companies to reduce their carbon footprint by enabling telecommuting and remote collaboration, but recycling is also part of the package.

 

As mentioned earlier, all of Mitel’s products are compliant with European regulations for environmental conduct. This is especially noteworthy in the U.K., where such standards tend to be pretty stringent.

 

“In the UK, the onus is put on the manufacturer to be responsible for their equipment from birth to death,” Walsh explained. “The manufacturer must be able to take the equipment back and make sure it's recycled.”

 

In order to sell its products in the U.K., therefore, Mitel complies with the WEEE standard, which dictates such lifecycle responsibility. These same products are sold in the U.S., but until recently there wasn’t enough attention being paid to “greenness” to warrant marketing the offerings as such.

 

“Unfortunately, in North America our society has not been as progressive as in Europe, Walsh said. “But all of Mitel's sets and equipment are compliant.”

 

Mitel is now working to set up an end-of-lifecycle recycling program in the U.S. The company is partnering with Global Investment Recovery for this initiative, which involves taking old equipment and decommissioning it down to the essential component levels to prevent this material from ending up in landfills.

 

A key advantage of this program is that the decommissioning takes place in the U.S., nearby the point of collection. This means fossil fuels are not wasted transporting the used-up phones and other equipment to the decommissioning facility.

 

Naidoo said casings from Mitel products will be sent to local steel mills, and precious metals in the circuits will be collected for re-processing.

 

“Everything will get reused,” she said.

 

Finding a U.S.-based partner to decommission Mitel products locally was somewhat of a challenge.

 

“There are very few recyclers in the U.S. that de-commission telephony equipment generally, and more specifically things like switches and business phones,” Naidoo said.

 

Part of the reason for this dearth of phone system recyclers, Naidoo said, is that the Environmental Protection Agency only maintains energy efficiency and recycling requirements for consumer products such as faxes, printers, cell phones and computer screen LCDs; these regulations do not cover business communication products such as telephone switches, phones, and PBXs.

 

 

Mitel’s green efforts are based on two concepts that no longer are viewed as exclusive of each other: being mindful of the environment is a moral obligation to protect our planet for future generations, and being kind to the environment makes good business sense. This second point is probably the more compelling one for many companies and consumers who want to do the right thing but may not be convinced until they see the positive impact on their budgets and wallets.

 

In addition to its general efforts that span the company’s entire product line, Mitel develops custom applications that integrate phone systems with businesses infrastructure automation in order to aid in energy-reducing efforts. For example, the phone system could be integrated with a building’s lighting and heating, allowing after-hours security personnel to easily lower or turn off lights and heat in particular areas.

 

Employees, too, can be empowered using their phone sets to control the lighting and heating in specific offices. Likewise, in an education setting, this type of functionality could be used in dorm rooms on a college campus.

 

“It makes business sense to be green.” Naidoo said