The potential that tech has to fight the climate crisis is still a work in progress, and the industry must make sustainable products and services a priority, writes Wes van den Berg, vice president, UK&I at Pure Storage.
- The majority of companies are treating sustainability initiatives as a priority, but just half are actually on track to meet their goals, according to new research.
- With the tech industry accounting for 2-3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, there’s a sector-wide responsibility to ensure that technology is the most efficient it can be.
- The responsibility is on the sector to support enterprises on this journey by delivering green solutions to really make a difference for the planet.
World Earth Day on 22 April reminded us of the importance of investing in our planet, with this year’s annual event marking a make-or-break year in enterprise sustainability.
Research commissioned by Pure Storage shows that the majority of companies (78%) are treating sustainability initiatives as a priority, but just half (51%) are actually on track to meet their goals.
With ESG factors now a consideration for two-thirds of investors, and greater awareness of greenwashing (40% of green claims made online are potentially misleading), it’s not enough in 2023 to just have environmental-based initiatives on the books. Failing to deliver a strong, tangible ESG program backed up by data now has the potential to do serious harm to brands and businesses.
With sustainability now such an important business issue, investors and customers are demanding green solutions to enable them to reach their goals. They’re turning to the technology industry, and in some areas, tech is already delivering the green solutions they need.
Tech’s role in enabling greener enterprises
With the tech industry accounting for 2-3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, there’s a sector-wide responsibility to ensure that technology is the most efficient it can be. The right tech implementations can have a real and immediate impact on reducing carbon emissions.
Enterprise data storage is a prime example. Eco-friendly data centre design has been talked about for years, and the general imperative to be more efficient has fresh impetus as there’s growing awareness of the issues and how tech can contribute. For example, the impact of energy-and natural resource-hungry data centres on house building in major cities such as London, halting building work due to a lack of capacity on the electricity grid.
In an effort to address this, there have been creative approaches from some within the technology sector to truly transform data centres from being power guzzlers and also reduce organisations’ carbon footprints. Some of the most impactful developments include:
Modern flash-based storage engineered to support energy-efficient data growth
Businesses create more data today than they ever have before and need to be mindful of how this growth will impact their energy use. Modern storage solutions are greener as flash-based storage uses less power, takes up less space and requires less cooling than equivalent legacy disk-based storage. Despite substantial data growth, enterprises that implement flash-based storage can reduce their data centre floor space, therefore significantly reducing costs and the power and cooling needs that data storage requires.
The shift to data centres becoming renewable energy sources.
Even with modern storage solutions, data centres create excess power, but this can actually provide an avenue for positive environmental impact by recycling enormous amounts of heat and energy. In London, for example, a washing-machine-sized data centre is being used to heat a public swimming pool. At a data centre in France, they’re using waste power to grow plants on a rooftop farm. And in the Swedish capital Stockholm, home to over 900,000 people, local data centres are being used to power homes.
The carbon footprint and environmental impact of data centres have come under significant scrutiny in recent times and rightly so. It’s clear that the data storage sector has taken these criticisms seriously, making real strides to be greener both with data storage hardware and the centres that house it.
Businesses must demand that the wider tech industry takes this approach, too. Rather than offsetting environmental impact and claiming tech is ‘carbon neutral’, customers must challenge their suppliers to make real, tangible green changes to the way products are made and how they work, for example reducing e-waste by stopping a rip and replace a three to five year cycle for hardware.
It’s about lifting the lid on ESG data and taking a critical look into how initiatives not only impact a supplier’s carbon footprint but how their products and services impact their customers, too. This is how tech can make a real difference in the climate emergency.
It’s time to supercharge green tech efforts
The potential that tech has to fight the climate crisis is still a work in progress, and the industry must make sustainable products and services a priority. For example, we must explore increasing the lifecycle of technology – more than 50 million metric tons of e-waste is generated globally each year and just 17.4% is collected and recycled properly. How can we reduce e-waste by either making tech last longer, reusing it, or replacing parts of it in situ?
For this year’s World Earth Day the theme was: ‘Invest in our planet’. For enterprises, that means acting on initiatives. It’s not good enough that just half of organisations are hitting their green goals, we need to see all environmental goals coming to fruition.
For tech, the responsibility is on the sector to support enterprises on this journey by delivering green solutions to really make a difference for the planet. Environmental impact has the power to make-or-break business, the sooner we can act on that, the better.
The opinions of guest authors are their own and do not necessarily represent those of SG Voice.
