The National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS) is Australia’s most widely used environmental performance rating tool for buildings. While NABERS is primarily known for rating energy and water efficiency in commercial offices, its expanding scope and the growing focus on whole-of-building sustainability mean that IT equipment management is becoming increasingly relevant to achieving and maintaining strong NABERS ratings.
What NABERS Measures
NABERS provides star ratings (1 to 6 stars) for buildings across several categories including energy, water, waste, and indoor environment. The ratings are based on measured, operational performance rather than design intentions, which makes them particularly credible and widely trusted by investors, tenants, and building owners.
NABERS Energy for offices is the most established rating and is mandatory for commercial office buildings over 1,000 square metres when sold or leased. NABERS Waste, while less widely adopted, evaluates how well a building manages its waste streams, including e-waste.
How IT Equipment Affects NABERS Energy
IT equipment is one of the largest energy consumers in a modern office building. Computers, monitors, servers, networking equipment, printers, and other devices collectively account for a significant portion of a building’s base building and tenancy energy consumption. For NABERS Energy ratings, particularly tenancy ratings, the efficiency of your IT equipment directly affects your score.
Older IT equipment typically consumes more energy than newer, more efficient models. A desktop computer from five years ago may draw 150 to 200 watts during operation, while a modern equivalent might use 50 to 80 watts. The energy difference across hundreds of devices over a full year is substantial.
This creates an interesting tension with circular economy principles. From a carbon perspective, extending equipment life reduces embodied carbon emissions. From an operational energy perspective, newer equipment is often more efficient. The optimal approach depends on the specific equipment and how the energy savings compare to the embodied carbon of replacement devices.
NABERS Waste and E-Waste
NABERS Waste ratings evaluate a building’s waste management performance, including diversion rates and waste stream separation. E-waste that is properly segregated from general waste and sent for certified recycling contributes positively to waste diversion metrics.
Buildings that achieve high NABERS Waste ratings typically have dedicated e-waste collection points or programmes, clear signage and tenant guidance on e-waste disposal, regular e-waste collection schedules, and documented diversion rates for all waste streams including electronics.
In Victoria, where e-waste has been banned from landfill since 1 July 2019, any e-waste entering the general waste stream represents a compliance failure as well as a drag on NABERS Waste performance.
Data Centres and NABERS
NABERS also offers ratings for data centres, which is directly relevant to organisations managing on-premises server infrastructure. The NABERS Data Centre rating measures the energy efficiency of data centre operations, typically expressed as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE).
IT asset management practices affect data centre NABERS ratings in several ways. Decommissioning legacy servers that consume excessive power relative to their computing output improves PUE. Replacing older storage and networking equipment with more efficient models reduces the energy denominator. Properly managing server room temperature through efficient layout and removing decommissioned “dead” hardware improves cooling efficiency.
An effective ITAD programme that regularly removes end-of-life servers, storage, and networking equipment from the data centre floor is a practical contributor to maintaining or improving data centre energy ratings.
Green Leases and IT Equipment
Many commercial buildings with high NABERS ratings operate under green lease arrangements that include sustainability obligations for tenants. These obligations may extend to IT equipment management, including requirements to purchase energy-efficient equipment (such as ENERGY STAR rated devices), to properly dispose of e-waste through approved channels, to report on IT energy consumption as part of tenancy energy audits, and to participate in building-wide waste management programmes.
If your organisation leases space in a NABERS-rated building, understanding these obligations and integrating them with your IT procurement and disposition processes ensures compliance with your lease terms while contributing to the building’s overall sustainability performance.
IT Procurement for NABERS Performance
Procurement decisions made today affect your NABERS performance for the next three to five years. When specifying new IT equipment with NABERS in mind, consider energy efficiency ratings and certifications (ENERGY STAR, EPEAT), power consumption in both active and idle states, sleep mode and power management capabilities, and the overall energy footprint of the device over its expected lifecycle.
Choosing equipment with strong power management features and ensuring those features are properly configured can make a meaningful difference to your building’s energy performance. A fleet of 200 laptops that properly enters sleep mode when idle consumes significantly less energy than the same fleet with power management disabled.
Reporting IT Contributions to NABERS
When your organisation’s NABERS rating is being assessed, having data on your IT equipment fleet and its energy characteristics can support a strong result. Useful data points include the number and type of IT devices in operation, their average age and energy efficiency ratings, power management configurations, e-waste volumes and diversion rates, and any IT-related energy efficiency improvements implemented during the rating period.
For organisations pursuing broader sustainability improvements across their operations, integrating IT lifecycle management with building performance is a practical approach. For more on how to measure and report the environmental impact of your IT decisions, see our guide on measuring the environmental impact of IT disposal.
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