Transcript

SCOTT STONHAM

I was recently invited by Jisc to work with them on what turned out to be a very timely and very interesting report on digital carbon footprints. They wanted to raise the discussion. Set a line in the sand and start talking about digital carbon footprints. There's been – I think we all realise there have had lots of interesting conversations, some really – I mean, over the last few decades, if you look back, there's been some amazing research already that's gone into understanding the carbon footprint and the energy consumption of our technological lifestyles and the digital usage.

When we were putting this report together, we decided to focus on four areas – procurement, on-premises IT, cloud, and the kind of remote piece – because you have the procurement piece, the on-prem IT, cloud technology, as well as remote working. The purchasing piece, we really went into the scope 3 impact of purchasing, from the equipment we buy, how do we use it longer, how do we bring the philosophy and practice of refurbish, re-manufactured IT into our environments to help us stretch the lifetime of these assets so we don't have to keep buying new things.

We also looked at how do we make sure that we're implementing the right policies to ensure that once we are done with the equipment, it doesn't just get trashed or end up in a landfill or – but molten down and all of these harmful gases. There's various different approaches and tips and techniques that we can look at there, from understanding how do you get down to a product level scope 3 understanding, which can help individuals buy in to change much more than just a cost or financial incentive.

And then it also looked at – when we're thinking about the on-premise, when we're thinking about the procurement side, how do we make sure we have the right baselines to make sure that we have the right questions to ask when we're purchasing things? We talked a bit about baselines and measuring things. And it's important for us to be able to put that baseline into play, but understand that baseline is going to change as we developed our understandings further.

The procurement piece is really important because, if we look at the carbon emissions of IT in general, 80% of the carbon emissions are attributed to what's called the embodied carbon and carbon equivalent within that product. So that means that the carbon emissions that have been generated in the process of manufacturing, building, distributing your equipment.

Then of course, you have the e-waste problem as well. So, what happens to it once it's gone? Do you reuse it? Do you recycle it? Do you break it down into its minerals and reuse those? All of that is a tremendous amount of the total carbon footprint of a piece of IT. On top of that, you have the energy and the emissions that are related to the things that happen when you're using it. But it tends to be 20%.

So, if we're looking for the biggest area to focus on, it's got to be making sure that we're making wiser, more long-term decisions about the things that we are buying and what happens to them once we've finished using them. And ideally, how do we make sure that the time – the usable lifetime is longer? How do we make that a longer service time?

So, procurement is really important. But not all the information is there yet. And this is one of those things to do with uncertainty in working in a world where we don't know everything, but we need to. So, this is where we can start looking at scope 1, scope 2, scope 3 within the GHG protocol as well. Scope 1, just to recap, is the energy that we buy and we consume, scope 2 is the energy and the emissions associated from running our buildings and our fleets around. Everything else goes from the products and services we buy and the emissions that have been generated in producing and distributing those, through to where our money is being used, in the pensions and our investments, through to the energy being used by the end users of our products, and our staff, and our teams.

There's 15 categories of scope 3. It's the lion's share of all emissions for all organisations. Within that scope 3, the purchasing of services and goods is, again, the chunk of that. That is around 90% of most people's scope 3 is in that, 70 to 90%. So that is something that supply chain and procurement has control over. In on-premises section, we looked primarily at things like the primary technology you would imagine an IT organisation being responsible for – so laptops, screens, mice, and all sorts of other things.

But the other thing that we've got to think about is the world of IT is also stretching now into our buildings and our estates as well. As things are becoming smarter, smart buildings, our buildings are a tremendous – have a tremendous environmental impact, but they can also have a more positive impact as well if we think about them carefully.

And IT is being enabled – is being put into place to help enable that as well. So, on-prem side, it's not just about laptops and servers, it's about other things related to IT as well. Cloud is an interesting area because, again, we kind of think of cloud as being out of sight, out of mind, most of the time. But there is a cost to storing data, there's a cost to accessing it, cost of processing it. And that's not just, obviously, a financial cost, there's a carbon cost there as well.

So, we looked at some of the things that we can do to help understand what those costs are and some of the things that we can do to help cut those things down. There are applications that we all have running in the cloud all the time that we don't need all the time. There are HR systems running – sitting there spun up on the servers that we don't need if the organisation is on holiday or out of season. So, there are things we can do there.

There are – from all of the major manufacturers, cloud providers, they provide now their own scorecards, their own carbon dashboards as well. So, understanding they're there and knowing how to use them can help bring awareness. The big piece of this as well is bringing out that data and making sure we understand what that data is so we know what the baseline is, and again, so we can improve it.

From the remote point of view, we looked at the cost of energy. How do we understand the energy that's being used by our workforce? How do we improve the access to equipment in a way that means that we're not adding extra carbon footprint for – I don't know, if your laptop breaks down, you don't have to go into the office to replace that and then come back again to get a new one. How do we solve things in a smarter way?

So, all of that is in the report. And there's a lot of different tips and tricks from how do you optimise fan speeds in an on-premise data centre, through to how could you, maybe, use a smart plug like this to understand and gamify change through different departments, but also through remote working and remote learning as well.