Let’s start by defining our terms of reference – for the purpose of this article sustainable technology refers to making the tech product itself sustainable, not technology that enables sustainability.
Technology has a huge impact on a company’s ability to achieve it’s ESG objectives. According to the World Economic Forum less than 25% of organisations have a specific, comprehensive, and sustainable IT strategy, with well-defined goals and target timelines. With 50% of these companies saying they lack the tools to adopt and deploy solutions for sustainability IT initiatives.
But the technology industry itself is a major contributor to the global carbon challenge – it’s emissions currently outweigh those of the aviation industry. A combination of factors – from manufacturing to powering servers and platforms – mean that organisations cannot hope to meet their ESG targets without a sustainable IT strategy.
We may as well start with the obvious – even the most carbon-conscious executives are susceptive to the lure of bright, new, shiny things. But rather than invest in a new suite of technology (either physical or digital) we need to spend a lot more time exploiting the technology we have already invested in.
In the current climate of limited budgets and a renewed focus on cost efficiency, every sector needs to be more confident than ever that each new investment is entirely necessary, and that means carefully assessing the capabilities of your current technology stack, understanding the functionality that exists but has not been leveraged or deployed, and re-assessing business objectives before making decisions on new solutions.
The biggest example of needless carbon consumption has to be the volume of carbon consumed by “zombie servers”. These are servers where the data was transferred to a new server, consolidated, or removed, but the now defunct server is kept “alive”, needlessly utilising power and energy. Maintaining good data hygiene, which allows organisations to dispose of data that isn’t required anymore or store it more appropriately, is an essential part of reducing carbon consumption. We can even go beyond data, by identifying applications, hard technologies and locations that are unused, poorly performing, or energy intensive, we can make significant progress towards better carbon health.
Better data and technology hygiene is one solution, another is choosing a green server provider. Almost countless options are now available that are powered by renewable energy. Some IT vendors, such as Apple are using 100% renewable energy at every point in its supply chain. Perhaps more radical is the move by some heavy consumers to move to nuclear. Last year Google announced that it was investing in “miniature” nuclear power centres to provide carbon free power to fuel its massive energy needs. Without these Google was clear that it would be impossible to achieve its own ESG targets.
(This does leave open one very interesting commercial proposition – what’s to stop Google offering miniaturised nuclear power stations to its own clients, similarly to how Amazon has commercialised its own need for cloud-based platforms?)
Democratizing software or IT solutions is another relatively new, but highly effective answer – by being part of an open sourcing approach to software, organisations can avoid needless consumption. The principle is no different to not buying tools when you can pool resources with a neighbour; solutions like public cloud providers and public software platforms, enjoy the benefits of scale, and allow organisations to avoid investing in digital solutions that have already been developed, tested, and implemented (on someone else’s time, and on someone else’s carbon footprint…). Removing the need for physical technology upfront, by leveraging hyper-cloud services could be the answer, especially as current WEF data tells us that less than 10% of all IT hardware is recycled, and as a result 55.5 million tonnes of e-waste was created in 2022.
But perhaps the most important change organisations can make is mindfulness, and ultimately based on people and culture. The painful truth is we all tend to do what is being measured, so by setting clear targets and objectives, analysing the data, and constantly adapting our IT strategy, we can make every level of the organisation accountable (and empowered) for the changes needed to green our technology, and cool our planet.
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Chelsea Chamberlin leads Roc’s Solution and Technology strategy, ensuring continual innovation and focussed partnerships which drive outcome based value for our customers. Chelsea’s background includes designing and delivering software and networking solutions within mission critical environments. Outside of work she is a green belt in Kick-boxing and mentor to young women paving careers in tech.