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How to grow your own eco-friendly tech team
Case study: The Eden Project shows you can be lean - and green

By Steve Ranger

Published: Wednesday 13 September 2006

The eco-friendly stance of the Eden Project is also shaping the decisions made in its IT operations.

Eden gets around 1.2 million visitors per year, drawn to the giant futuristic bubble-like greenhouses known as 'biomes' which contain plants from around the world.

The not-for-profit charitable trust aims to teach visitors about our relationship with and dependence upon plants and this includes championing issues such as recycling and reducing waste.

As a result, as well as keeping the systems running, Eden's IT team have to think about how it disposes of hardware, and what contribution it can make to help Eden towards its goal of being waste neutral.

Eden head of ICT Jon Curry explained: "There is a desire to take a lead on these issues. It does make the business different - it adds that additional dimension."

The charity has 250 desktop users on its Cisco network and 65 Epos units across the site. "It's a single site but it's very much a campus location with a big pit in the middle," explained Curry.

Everything has to be measured carefully - from the number of printer cartridges and the weight of input and output, to how much recycled paper is used.

But this doesn't mean Eden shies away from new technology. For example, it has just begun using mobile ticketing technology from Swiftpass so visitors can get their entry ticket delivered to their mobile phones and save on queuing time.

Visitors using the mobile ticket option have a digital ticket in the form of a secure barcode sent to their phones. This is then scanned on entry to the site.

The trust benefits by being able to sell more tickets directly, rather than through third parties, and by saving on postage, printing and distribution costs.

Curry told silicon.com: "If you are down here on holiday posting is no good and maybe you don't have access to email, so the fulfilment process has been an issue until now. Mobile phone ticketing is another fulfilment route."

He added: "It's an easy way for people to get their ticket, beat the queue and buy direct so we hope it is going to be a success."

There is also more of a focus on choosing local suppliers than you might find in many organisations.

In the five years after opening, Eden had contributed £700m to the local economy.

The economic ripple effect that comes from the Eden Project is not just about the people employed on the site but also the impact on the local economy. The charity has brought its IT operation back in-house and tries to use local suppliers.

Curry explained: "It's a much more SME-based economy and there are not so many big players, so we have smaller partners to work with and where we can we like to work with the local community. And wherever possible we do that in the IT function as well."

Curry also intends to use business intelligence to understand the visitors and to measure Eden's eco footprint - and use that data to work out what can be done to reduce it further.