Struggling to meet your net-zero commitments? Think sustainable IT.

Everyone loves a funny meme. But have you ever stopped to think about its effect on the climate

Every piece of digital data has a carbon footprint: every meme, email, Teams message, photo, video clip, Word document, spreadsheet, PowerPoint … They all take up space on a server, somewhere in a data centre. And data centres use power. A lot of power. The National Grid sees them taking up around 6% of UK electricity consumption by 2030.¹ Meanwhile, ICT’s share of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has doubled since 2013, from 2% to 4%. And it’s forecast to reach 9% next year.²

Experts reckon that in a couple of years, the world’s entire supply of renewable energy won’t be enough to power our data storage needs.³ If like many firms, yours has pledged to reduce its emissions – or even achieve net zero operations – then you’ll need to factor in the impact of your IT systems.

All the data you’re storing may be a good place to start. Not least because research suggests that some 68% of it is only ever used once by organisations.⁴ Yet there it sits on your servers (or those of your cloud providers), using energy and driving emissions.

But thinking about how people use data within the business is just the tip of the sustainable IT iceberg. What about the emissions embedded in the manufacture of your enterprise hardware, and the devices your employees use? How much power does it take to run your software applications? How do you manage e-waste? And most importantly of all: what can you do about all of this?

There are myriad approaches, practices and initiatives that will help bring down your digital carbon footprint – far more than we can cover here. But to give you a flavour, these can include:

• Powering down. Encourage your staff to dim their screen displays: a 70% cut can save 20% of your monitors’ energy use.⁵ And make a policy of switching off and unplugging PCs and laptops at the end of the working day, rather than leaving them in sleep mode.
• Minding your emails. Educate your employees about more sustainable email use. Is it necessary to hit ‘reply to all’? Are they permanently deleting messages they no longer need?
• Clearing out cloud space. Implement processes to ensure unnecessary files are deleted from your cloud systems. You might also want to investigate the sustainability practices of your cloud service providers.
• Extending device life. Expecting staff to hang onto their laptops and mobiles for another year will dramatically reduce embedded emissions and e-waste. When you do replace hardware, dispose of the old devices responsibly.
• Adopting green dev methods. Sustainable IT development includes using less carbon-hungry coding languages. Python is particularly emissions-intensive: running a Python program for an hour is equivalent to driving a mile in the average car. Languages like Rust require much less computation power.
• Checking your chips. Even details like the chips inside your servers can have an appreciable effect on your digital emissions. 

That may sound like an enormous effort to take on. Given the sheer scale of the task, it can be tempting to jump straight in and start launching ad hoc projects. But that risks stretching your resources too thin, and achieving little in the way of concrete progress. Sustainable IT requires a considered, strategic, and systematic approach.

You can’t set off on your digital carbon reduction journey without knowing where it begins. So start by measuring your ICT’s carbon footprint. That may seem obvious, but most executives (57%) don’t actually know the extent of their firm’s digital emissions.⁶

We recommend that you align your benchmarking activity to the GHG Protocol ICT Sector Guidance and Product Standard. This enables you to get a full picture of GHG emissions across your whole ICT estate, including all major public cloud providers and digital products.

Benchmarking your emissions will allow you to establish reduction targets and monitor your progress against them. Not sure where to start?

There are ready-made tools that can help you evaluate your IT emissions, which are available from companies like GoCodeGreen. Its tools provide a detailed view of your current position across your carbon estate. And they offer insights into what action you can take to have a concrete impact – whether that’s changing your cloud or energy provider or reviewing your development practices.

So, plenty to think about next time an amusing meme lands in your inbox.