Digital Sustainability — Rethinking our habits (Part 2)

5 min readAug 6, 2024

By rethinking our methodologies, minor changes can have monumental impacts.

In the first instalment of this four part series, we highlighted what Digital Sustainability is, and why it’s a critical subject that few people are talking about. We left off by highlighting how everyday tasks can have a significant contribution to our Digital Carbon Footprint (DCF), and in this article, we will explore new attitudes that we can adopt.

A Three Tiered Approach

Jumping straight into it — we can structure these attitudes into three tiers: Consume, Contribute and Collaborate.

Consume

The first attitude is to consume less, which is the one most of us will think of primarily. This is all about ‘doing our bit’ individually to reduce our carbon footprint. Recycling, switching to electric vehicles, turning off appliances — and so on. This is the method we hear so often about and albeit, it does make a difference, it’s more of a moral win for individuals. When you examine the impact these ideas have in the grand scheme of things, it’s minuscule and only work when change is made on mass. Things like government legislation — such as banning production on petrol and diesel cars, implementing clean air zones — these are what multiply the impact of those actions.

Let’s look at an example of reusing a plastic bag. You’d have to reuse it 8,000 times to cover the fuel usage for a flight from New York to London. That’s once a day for 22 years. If we look at the reduction of plastic in the ocean — almost all plastic is from fishing fleets and developing countries. Leading countries have effective waste management programmes and are much smaller contributors when compared. I’m not encouraging these to be ignored, they are all positive contributions to a person’s carbon footprint. However, we have two better attitudes available to us.

Contribute

By contributing more, we can work together to collectively reduce our carbon footprints. This includes paying to offset travel emissions, making a donation to a cause/charity/research program, or volunteering in your local community. If a person earning the average median wage in the US donated 10% of their yearly salary ($3000) to projects promoting innovation in neglected green technologies, that would equate to reducing 3000 tonnes of CO2e per year. The difficulty when comparing contribute to consume is it requires active or financial engagement to participate in.

Activities within this space also raise moral and ethical issues which are highly debated. They will involve a specific company or organisation, and questions may be raised about their models and priorities. When you’re donating to a charity, for example, how much of your donation will go towards the intended goal, and how much may be absorbed by operating costs and salaries? The amount of people involved with these activities makes a larger difference than solo effort, but this brings me onto the final attitude.

Collaborate

By far the most influential attitude is to collaborate better. Changing workflows, adapting methodologies and streamlining our own approaches. For professionals working within product development, we have the world at our fingertips for digital optimisation. Many of us may be working B2C delivering services that could be used by millions.

Google receives around 3 billion unique monthly visitors. When you scale singular interactions to those figures, even the smallest changes become astronomical. Reducing data transfer sizes, bandwidth usage, refactoring code — these are key components in reducing a company’s DCF, and by proxy, their employees’. Even just a couple of megabytes saved by compressing an image can bring your DCF down dramatically. We’ll talk more about ways we can all improve out methodologies in the next blog post.

Empowering change

One of the biggest motivators for big tech to consider sustainability is the reduction in costs through power consumption. This is a major weapon we can use to sell digital sustainability. Consider the collaborative efforts of major tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Google’s introduction of more efficient algorithms for their search engine resulted in a significant reduction in energy consumption across millions of searches each day. Similarly, Facebook’s data centre in Sweden uses natural cooling from the surrounding environment, a decision born from collaborative engineering and environmental science.

The Open Compute Project (OCP) is a great example of how to influence big tech with sustainability. Founded by employees of Meta (formerly Facebook), the OCP aims to design and enable the delivery of the most efficient server, storage, and data centre hardware for scalable computing. Over 50 companies across the world are currently members of OCP, including tech giants Microsoft, Google and NVIDIA. This collaboration has led to innovations that reduce the environmental footprint of data centres worldwide, showcasing the power of collective effort in driving substantial change.

Let’s take a quick look at one of their flagship initiatives — the Open Accelerator Module (OAM). Bare with me as we get a bit techy here, but I’ll try to keep it as high level as possible.

The OAM is a specification developed to standardise the form factor and interface for accelerator hardware used in data centres (a way to speed up computing tasks). By providing a common design for these high-performance components, integration is simplified and ensures compatibility across different systems. This standardisation helps optimise data centre efficiency, reduce energy consumption, and promote sustainability. With OAM, companies can easily upgrade their hardware, fostering innovation and scalability while minimising their digital carbon footprint.

Think of the Open Accelerator Module (OAM) as the standardised plug-and-play system for data centre accelerators. Just as USB ports have standardised connectors for various devices, OAM provides a common form factor and interface for accelerator modules, ensuring they work seamlessly across different systems. By promoting interoperability, OAM allows data centres to easily upgrade and optimise their hardware, much like how a universal plug simplifies connecting devices worldwide.