Questions with Ulrich Hieber, Toshiba

EuroCIS.com talks to Ulrich Hieber, Divisional Manager Retail for Germany, Austria and Switzerland about the sustainibility of IT Products - the so-called "Green IT".


How much interest do you see among retailers in sustainable products?

Retailers have shown considerable interest in sustainable IT solutions. One or the other trading company even makes use of such solutions to bolster its image as a company conscious of the environment and also passes on relevant information to its customers on how the company realises a commitment it feels for protecting the environment. Therefore such retailers are especially attractive for consumers shopping very much with the environment in mind. For that reason, DEEN, the Dutch retail chain, operating 56 food consumer markets, relies on TOSHIBA TEC cash registers, runs a hybrid-powered vehicle pool as well as an energy-saving cold stores.
In Germany, Tedox, a DIY discount store chain, significantly reduced its paper consumption for sales slips. It thus contributes to protecting the environment. The company operates a total of 200 cash registers. They all run with TOSHIBA TEC thermal printers printing on both sides of the sales slips. This makes for reduced paper consumption. German retailers are also very much interested in cash registers using less energy. The latter actively contribute to protecting the environment and also result in considerably reduced cost.


Do your marketing measures and product development work also contribute to “Green IT“?

The Toshiba Group has taken a commitment under its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme. This gives absolute priority to comprehensive steps towards environmental protection. TOSHIBA TEC products, therefore, are subject to strict ecological regulations as regards environmentally-conscious manufacturing and packaging, long service life and recycling. To live up to our own environmental-protection commitments, developing new products and solutions for retail trade and devices using less electricity than previous models are major contributions to these objectives.

If so, which “sustainable and green“ products does your company put on the market?

Our new TOSHIBA TEC WILLPOS A20 and B20 cash registers feature the energy-saving Intel Celeron M 20 processor, which reduces CO2 emissions compared to its predecessors because it takes up less electricity. At the same time, point of sales terminals perform at much higher speeds, while an energy-saving mode also contributes to bringing down electricity consumption.
Also, TOSHIBA TEC thermal printers print on both sides of a sales slip, thus protecting the environment because they use less paper. This means that fewer resources are needed for transportation and storage as well.


Which savings may be realised using Green IT?

When comparing them to the previous cash register installations, our new TOSHIBA TEC WILLPOS A20 and B20 require up to 49 per cent less electricity while their performance was raised by a maximum of 76 per cent at the same time. When we ran our own calculations for the energy consumption of our WILLPOS B20 TOSHIBA TEC cash terminal and compared them to the model manufactured before, we found that a retail operation may clock savings – in Euro - in the five-digit range annually.