South Africa’s higher education sector held its second Green IT special interest group (SIG) webinar yesterday under the auspices of the South African University Directors of Information Technology (ASAUDIT). There were 13 participants from SU, UCT, NMMU and RU. Charl Souma of the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Dolf Krige from Stellenbosch University (SU) each gave a slide and audio presentation on sustainable IT initiatives on their respective campuses via Adobe Connect’s webinar infrastructure.
1. UCT e-waste initiative – Charl Souma
Charl detailed UCT’s successful lauch of their campaign, with the catchy slogan “Let’s get WAST-(Ed)”. He shared a number of useful documents including how e-Waste is described in their ICT service catalogue, the e-waste confirmation form that users have to fill out, etc. Clearly UCT has put in a lot of thinking into policy issues. Other South African institutions now have two working case studies, UCT and SU, to learn from and build on. UCT and SU’s approaches overlap to a large extent – they both use the Recover e-Alliance’s services – but there are important differences in policy and logistics.
2. SU campus-wide energy management system – Dolf Krige
Dolf outlined SU’s project to deploy 87 energy meters (phase 1) on campus in order to devolve electricity billing to buildings and departments and thus really drive energy conservation and efficiency on campus. He also demonstrated the Energy Cybernetics dashboard that will also be rolled out to student and staff web portals to promote awareness and management of energy. Implementation is well advanced.
The next webinar will be scheduled in 2 to 3 months’ time.
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