Accessibility statement

IT Services win sustainability award

Posted on 15 March 2024

IT Services have won the award for the Sustainable Digital Project or Initiative at the prestigious UCISA awards.

York clinched the award for delivering a number of high impact IT initiatives in support of the institution's ambitious vision to be carbon neutral by 2030.

Find out more about some of the projects included in our submission below.

Reducing how much we print 

We’ve reduced the number of multi-function printers on campus by 40%. We’ve also been encouraging staff and students to print less and use alternatives to printing where possible, as well as educating them on how to avoid spoiled prints. This project is estimated to be saving 3.03 tonnes of CO2e per year and was delivered by a staff and student-led Green Impact Project Team, who went on to win a Green Impact Platinum Award. 

Powering down equipment when it’s not being used 

We’re currently rolling out a process to shut down equipment in our PC classrooms when they’re not being used. Already, this is estimated to have saved 18.8 tonnes of CO2 and over £25,000 in electricity costs. Similarly, we’ve set up sensors in approximately 300 teaching rooms to automatically turn off equipment in rooms which aren’t being used.

Recycling old IT equipment 

Working with our IT hardware provider, we've recycled and refurbished over 4,500 devices and prevented 44 tonnes of IT waste from reaching landfills. When we use the providers app to book collections of unwanted laptops and PCs, we contribute to their tree planting programme and earn cash rebates, many of which are donated to charities.

Viking 2

We’ve moved our high-performance computing cluster, Viking, to EcoDataCenter in Sweden. Viking is used by lots of our researchers to develop and complete compute jobs.  EcoDataCenter is the world’s first data centre to be made from wood and runs on 100% renewable energy. The centre also utilises excess heat created by the computer clusters to dry wood and create pellets which act as a renewable energy source. Read more about Viking 2. 

Reducing power consumption across our data centres

We've reduced the amount of power used across our main campus data centres by 12.6%.  This process includes removing old, inefficient switches, tracking down departmental owners of servers and decommissioning equipment no longer needed. Data centres are physical locations where we store all our computer systems and IT infrastructure.