Many businesses in the UK have no plans to make their IT systems more environmentally friendly, a new report suggests.

Research from the Green Technology Initiative found that 70 per cent of UK businesses have no targets to reduce their carbon footprint.

Despite 90 per cent of UK firms saying that they think it is important for business to reduce the impact IT systems have on the environment, most are failing to translate this belief into action.

Instead, businesses think that suppliers and the government should be responsible for creating IT systems with fewer emissions.

Over three-quarters (79 per cent) of small firms do not link power costs to hardware spend or IT budgets and 95 per cent of businesses have no idea how efficient their IT systems are.

"What we are doing in IT today is not sustainable," explained Dan Sutherland, acting chair of the Green Technology Initiative.

"Systems efficiency is the cheapest and easiest way of reducing the carbon footprint of the work you do and delivered properly it has the benefit of bringing down costs across the board."

Recently, major IT manufacturers agreed to aggressively work to reduce the emissions their systems produced.