How digital technologies can reduce the global carbon footprint — Part 1

Environmental impacts of ICT

7 min readMay 7, 2022

Introduction

Digital technologies are essential for economic and social development. The digital transition has been a vital tool in businesses, and digital objects and interfaces gradually become part of every aspect of our lives. Direct and indirect environmental impacts related to the growing use of digital technologies are constantly underestimated. However, it has been estimated that digital technologies emit about 4% of greenhouse gas emissions[1].

The Paris Agreement commits all the planet’s governments to drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The ever-increasing use of digital technologies and, thus, increased energy consumption make this challenge more difficult to overcome. By moving to more controlled use of digital technologies and steering our technology choices, we can preserve the essential contribution of digital while complying with the Paris Agreement requirements.

Environmental impacts of digital technologies

At the current rate, digital technologies will be gone within one to two generations[2]. It is indeed made from, among other things, ores and fossil fuels, the reserves of which are being depleted at high speed. Non-renewable resources are extracted halfway around the world in appalling conditions, both for ecosystems and local populations.

We know that digitalization taps resources that are critical for the energy transition. The appropriation of a gradually disproportionate part of available electricity increases the tension on electricity production, which we already struggle to decarbonize. The increase in the production of ICT equipment requires more significant quantities of rare and critical metals, which are also vital for low carbon energy technologies, while physical, geopolitical, and economic factors already limit their availability.

The reasons behind the strong growth in digital energy consumption are multiple, but based on an initial analysis, we can identify four primary sources[3]:

The smartphone phenomenon
The multiplication of the peripherals of daily life
The rise of the Industrial Internet of Things
The explosion of data traffic.

To comply with the commitments of the Paris Agreement made to ensure the survival of our planet, our energy consumption needs to be drastically reduced. As digital objects and interfaces have become part of every aspect of our lives in the last few years, digital transformation appears to be crucial in shifting towards a low carbon economy.

Today’s challenge is to put the digital transition at the service of ecological change. The convergence of these two transitions is necessary to accelerate the environmental growth and make the essential actors of tomorrow’s economy sober in resources. To achieve this convergence of digital and ecology, the actors must develop shared methodologies and action strategies to reduce the impacts of digital environmental issues and put its potential for innovation at the service of the ecological transition. Unfortunately, companies, local authorities, and national administrations rarely work together, and, often, people in charge of digital technologies and those in charge of the environment are different. This lack of communication must be addressed, and those actors must create a cultural community for ecological growth.

Environmental hotspots

This collection of articles focuses on four different hotspots in the value chain of digital technologies:

The data center industry, with its high energy consumption and e-waste generation
The lack of digital sobriety in our everyday lives, leading to global overconsumption of digital technologies
The data created and processed by each one of us
The unoptimized webservices

Data center industry

The main environmental impacts of data centers are related to the electricity consumed in the use phase of the data center. Energy efficiency in using data center equipment has been studied for many years. With the expansion of Green Computing, the optimization of energy use is now widely standardized by experts.

However, efficient use of resources is crucial to achieving sustainability, especially regarding the high economic and societal aspects related to IT equipment and Critical Raw Materials (CRMs). The waste generated in the data center industry is mainly electronic waste, which presents difficulties in the recycling process, resulting in significant losses of some elements where concentration is not high enough to be economically interesting to develop a recycling process even though many of these elements are considered as CRMs in Europe[4]. Consequently, an effective and complete circular economy system is not being applied, and further improvements must occur to ensure higher sustainability in data centers’ supply chains.

Overconsumption of digital technologies

According to Green IT, 60 to 80% of the digital industry’s environmental footprint is related to equipment. To change this trend, a sustainable digital industry requires the integration of new, more ethical practices[5]. More specifically, within organizations, sustainable digital technology should be based on policies around sustainability, from design to device recycling, making it possible to indefinitely counteract built-in obsolescence, the first obstacle to the sustainability of tools. Companies have a non-negligible scope for action to help reduce digital technologies’ carbon footprint. They can act on the choice of infrastructure, architecture, hardware, and software and the behavior of their employees, suppliers, and end clients.

There are several policies within companies that cover purchasing, recycling, the eco-design of applications, and the choice of materials. But there are few actions taken in terms of behavior and technical debt. Data management is also an issue that remains underestimated.

To help businesses organize their approaches to digital sobriety in a transversal way, the Cigref partnered with The Shift Project[6] and broke down the main steps to help companies implement it. Digital sobriety requires a global approach and includes strategic and operational stakes. It must be applied to an organization’s digital services and technologies and must be measurable and measured. Raising awareness among a company’s employees about digital technology’s impact on the environment is crucial. Digital sobriety also responds to a question of common sense: knowing how to make the right choices according to digital technology’s added value to the company versus the risks to the environment.

Data management

Cloud computing is the idea that data can be collected, analyzed, and stored in specialized, shared data centers worldwide before accessing any web-enabled services. It has become the go-to solution for most companies and our personal use in the last few years. With the rise of connected devices, more and more data are collected, thus increasing the need for more storage. This growth is driven, amongst others, by video, medical imaging, video surveillance, autonomous vehicles, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, analytics, and activities trackers.

It has been estimated that storage accounts for about 40% of the environmental impact of data centers[7]. Even though the data center industry has been embracing sustainability as a challenge, the ever-increasing weight of data collected and stored has not been considered. Therefore, to lower the environmental impact of our digital usage, we must reduce the amount of data produced, processed, transported, and stored as much as possible.

Web services

In 2015, there were around 3 billion connected terminals (smartphones and computers) and between 5 and 7 billion connected objects worldwide, with about 45 million servers. It was estimated that around 800 million active network devices (routers, core networks…) are connecting clients and servers. As the power consumption of equipment has fallen sharply in recent years and cloud computing is developing, the share of the network in overall power consumption will increase faster than that of other third parties (users and data centers) in coming years.

To translate these numbers into easy-to-understand environmental indicators, this number of connected terminals and devices corresponds to 200kg of greenhouse gases and 3000 liters of water per internet user per year. For 3 billion Internet users, the annual footprint on a worldwide scale would be[8]:

1,037 TWh of energy, i.e., 40 nuclear power plants or 140 million French people for one year
608 million tonnes of greenhouse gases, the equivalent of 86 million French people
8.7 billion m3 of water, i.e., the annual consumption of 160 million French people

It has been shown that the depletion of non-renewable resources, pollution, and health impacts occur mainly during electronic equipment manufacture and end of life. Greenhouse gas emissions are evenly split between manufacture and use. On the other hand, electricity and water consumption are predominant in the use phase.

Web services professionals can effectively reduce the web footprint by eco-designing these services. Linkedin and IBM have demonstrated that they have reduced the number of servers needed by more than 100 by eco-designing their digital services[9]. This approach is not reserved for global players in the web and IT, especially since there is a consensus repository of web eco-design best practices for the web.

To go further…

Resources

[1] The Shift Project. (2020). Implementing digital sufficiency: Executive summary.
[2] Iddri, FING, WWF France, GreenIT.fr (2018). Livre blanc Numérique et Environnement.
[3] Lean ICT — Les impacts environnementaux du Numérique. (2018, March 8). The Shift Project.
[4] Shittu, O. S., Williams, I. D., & Shaw, P. J. (2021). Global E-waste management: Can WEEE make a difference? A review of e-waste trends, legislation, contemporary issues and future challenges.
[5] Digital sobriety — using digital technology sensibly: What roles do companies have to play? (2022). Grenoble Ecole de Management
[6] Cigref, The Shift Project. (2020). Digital Sobriety: A responsible corporate approach.
[7] Brad Johns Consulting, LLC. (2021). Improving Information Technology sustainability with modern tape storage.
[8] Bordage, F. (2015). Quelle est l’empreinte environnementale du web ? Green IT.
[9] Bordage, F. (2015). Comment réduire l’empreinte environnementale du web ? Green IT.