The Federal Environment Agency commissioned the IZT to identify potential resource savings in the field of information and communication technology and to develop alternative courses of action for their realisation. A further task was to create a data basis for determining ecological and economic effects for the action area of office workplaces. The commission also included the organisation of a specialist conference on the subject of "Green through IT" at Cebit 2010 in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration and the Öko-Institut für angewandte Ökologie.

The UBA conference took place on 3 March 2010 at CeBIT in Hanover. The conference, organised by the IZT, was entitled "Green IT - Future trends in applications". Keynote speaker Dr Graham Vickery, Head of the Information Economy Sector at the OECD, presented the results of an OECD survey of over 90 green IT initiatives by governments and companies. He criticised the fact that most initiatives primarily focused on the direct environmental impact of information and communication technology (ICT) and mainly looked at energy consumption in the usage phase (e.g. electricity, heat and water consumption of ICT devices). For the future, he called for the improved utilisation of the innovation potential of ICT for environmentally oriented applications in the economy as a whole and the in-depth consideration of ICT-based environmental impacts at every stage of the product life cycle, from the development phase to production and recycling.

The presentations of the international speakers are available on the conference website: http://www.uba-green-it.de