In this is In this article, we give you 5 ways that IT can reduce your company’s carbon footprint.
Reducing your company’s carbon emissions is a worthy aim of and in itself. As we know, the planet is getting hotter and everyone needs to do their part to combat global warming.
Increasingly, who to work for and who to buy from will be determined by a company’s green credentials. Here are some quick wins to help move you closer to net zero.
1. Enable Remote Working
Statistics from the Department of Transport indicate that almost 11 million UK service sector workers commute by car. This equates to almost 31bn car miles per year, generating 12.6m tCO2e annual emissions.
In some cases, workers are commuting to an office principally to access their organisation’s IT and communications systems. Yet, this is unnecessary. Launching a desktop solution in the cloud gives users the same look and feel of a locally installed desktop. However, unlike a standard desktop, it can be accessed securely from any machine, anywhere.
If your employees are commuting to work by car, enabling them to work from home, even just one or two days a week, can have a huge impact on cutting your carbon emissions.
2. Cycle to Work
Over 85% of commuter cars have the driver as the only occupant. Many of these will be driving journeys of less than five miles. These trips could in many cases be made by bike. By encouraging commuters in England to travel by bike rather than car or bus could save a 44,000 tonnes of CO2 in a single week. This is equivalent to emissions produced by heating nearly 17,000 houses.
There are numerous schemes available for businesses to encourage cycle to work.
One of the barriers to commuting by bike is the need to carry cumbersome laptops and other IT equipment.
With desktops in the cloud, people can access the same computer from a terminal in the office and also from a personal computer when they work from home. No need to lug heavy equipment around on a bike.
3. Transition to Green Cloud Computing
According to a 2018 study, the Microsoft Azure cloud platform can be up to 93 percent more energy efficient and up to 98 percent more carbon efficient than on-premises solutions. Microsoft is on track to meet its objective of powering all their cloud operations from 100% renewable sources.
4. Reduce Personal Computing Energy Consumption
The service sector consumes 32% of all UK electricity, with 11% attributed to the use of IT solutions, creating an estimated 7.8m tonnes CO2e of annual greenhouse gas emissions.
Moving your computers to the cloud, enables users to work on low energy devices. Power-hungry desktops can be converted to light-weight ‘thin clients’ that need relatively little power to run. It is possible to reduce the power consumption of your computers by up to 50% by moving workloads to the cloud.
5. Sustainable Hardware Lifecycle Management
Typically, computers can be used for three years before their performance starts to decline.
However, replacing them probably has a greatest environmental impact. This is because up to 83% of a device’s total carbon footprint is generated during manufacturing.
To make a typical laptop requires 300 litres of water, uses 1,100KWh of energy and emits 272kgCO2e.
Waste generated from mining the precious metals that go into making a computer pollute water, air and soil and lead to decreased crop yields. Mining often contaminates food and water, and can cause respiratory and reproductive health issues.
When you replace your computers, you need to dispose of your old ones. Last year over 54 million tonnes of waste from electrical and electronic equipment were generated globally as old hardware models made way for new.
Extending the lifespan of a device tackles the issue of e-waste by spreading the environmental impact across a longer time-horizon.
If your users already have legacy personal computing devices, why not convert them to thin clients to access a cloud desktop solution? When you eventually do need to replace hardware, refurbished equipment is both greener and cheaper.
By moving to the cloud and repurposing the hardware, the embodied emissions created during the manufacture and distribution of every device can be spread across many more years, reducing the long-term environmental impact.
Summary
Moving your desktop computing to the cloud gives you 5 ways that IT can reduce your company’s carbon footprint. Desktops in the cloud will help you to:
- Enable remote working
- Encourage cycling to work
- Get power from renewable sources
- Reduce PC energy consumption by up to 50%
- Extend the life of your hardware
Contact Cogntion Cloud to find out more.
Sustainable. Smart. Secure.
David is a co-founder of Cognition Cloud and is passionate about sustainability in IT. Always thinking about how IT solutions can be greener, more secure and more cost effective.
