Lyons Computers has always been a frugal company without wastage of natural resources. During the year 2009 we have taken some new initiatives to help the world reduce paper and garbage. Environmentally Friendly Initiative We were getting several industry and technology news publications. We unsubscribed to all of them. We believe we saved about 10 trees this year alone. We started recycling packaging and shipping materials. As you can guess, we receive a lot of shipments and we recycle most of the packing materials, cardboard boxes. We even use the cardboard boxes as a topping on our workbench. It is economical and convenient. We have started shutting down our and customers computers at night and during weekends. We have started offering FREE laptop recycling services to our customers. If you have a laptop that doesn't work, drop it off for recycling.

Tips on How You Can Operate a Green IT Department

• Buy equipment that reduces energy consumption
• Turn off servers, computers and printers that are no longer in use. You won't believe how many of these are there in your company. Go ahead and shut it down. If someone needs it, they will tell you, otherwise keep it turned off.
• Set all the company laptops and notebooks to energy saver mode when not in use.
• Even if you have to keep the servers running, you can switch off the monitors connected to them.
• Use both sides of paper
• Unsubscribe to all the catalogs, yellow pages (there seems to be so many of them!), and magazines that you do not read. It takes time, but think of the wastage they are causing to the environment.
• Instead of buying new, repair old equipment. It might not always be economical in the short run, but surely economical in the long run as it reduces garbage and keeps local population employed.
• Consider upgrading the existing network and computing infrastructure than replacing.  As a civilization we need to get away from "use-and-throw" culture.
• Recycle used toners -- you probably are doing this anyway.