Digital sobriety, the other lever to reduce the energy and environmental impact of your company

With the increasing use of cloud solutions, companies tend to forget that digital tools and flows are far from being energy and environmentally neutral. At a time when any reduction in energy consumption counts, digital sobriety is becoming a significant item in the carbon footprint of companies and a full-fledged component of their CSR policy.

Digital has been so associated with the idea of “dematerialization” and the development of the cloud has so invisibilized IT infrastructures that it wasn’t until 2018 and the figures published by the Shift Project (report Lean ICT: Towards Digital Sobriety) that a large audience became aware of the environmental impact of digital technology on a global scale. It is now known that the digital sector accounts for about 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, two-thirds of the energy used worldwide, both to produce digital equipment and infrastructure and to operate them, being of fossil origin. 4% may not seem like much in view of the services obtained in return and the emissions avoided in other sectors, except that emissions due to digital technology are increasing at a rate of 9% per year, which is incompatible with the objectives of the Paris Agreement.

In France, due to the fact that most of the electricity used is of non-fossil fuel origin, the digital sector accounts for only 2% of national GHG emissions. This is a misleading view if we take into account imported emissions, since most digital equipment is produced outside France, using mainly carbon-based energy and materials (plastics, metals) whose production depends directly on fossil resources. The ADEME/Arcep study on the evaluation of the environmental impact of digital technology in France estimates that the digital sector accounts for 10% of French electricity consumption, but that terminals alone account for 79% of the carbon footprint of digital technology on a national scale.

A digital world that is not at all “immaterial”

In addition to the growing consumption of electricity due to the explosion of uses and the powerful “rebound effects” that systematically accompany energy efficiency gains, the production of equipment (servers, computers, smartphones, network equipment, etc.) is mobilizing not only growing volumes, but also an increasingly wide range of mineral and metal resources) is mobilizing not only growing volumes, but also an increasingly wide range of mineral and metal resources. However, the extraction of these resources, which are intrinsically non-renewable, is increasingly energy-intensive and generates waste and pollution, for two reasons:

• the decrease in the concentrations of the exploited deposits. For example, in the copper mines considered today as the “richest”, the copper content is only 0.2%. In an indium “rich” mine, there are only 100 grams of indium per ton of ore (0.01% concentration). As for gold, we are currently mining deposits with a grade of 0.0001%, or 1 gram of gold per ton of ore.
• the low recycling rate, due not only to the lack of organization or development of channels, but also to the dispersion of materials and the low recyclability of the complex alloys used in the digital industry. For example, the recycling rate for indium, gallium, tantalum and germanium found in smartphones is currently less than 1%.

In other words, well upstream of the use of digital technology, the dematerialization that it is supposed to bring results in phenomenal energy expenditure, an equally phenomenal production of waste and a proven depletion of certain resources that are indispensable for the continuation of the digital transition and the decarbonization of human activities.

How to become digitally “sober”

Faced with these facts, the only “sustainable” response – that is, one that reconciles the benefits of digital technology with climate and environmental issues – is to adopt a digital sobriety approach. If we take the Shift Project’s approach, digital sobriety at the individual level consists in “buying the least powerful equipment possible, in changing them the least often possible, and in reducing unnecessary energy-intensive uses“.

What seems feasible at the individual level, with a little good will, is much more complicated at the level of organizations, and even more so for companies whose economic performance and competitiveness are increasingly based on the digitization of processes and, therefore, an intensive use of digital technologies (hardware and software).

>>How can we deploy digital sobriety when the most common uses require more and more computing power, data flows and storage capacity?

>> How can we deliberately opt for frugality in an environment where everything pushes us to frequently renew our machine fleet, both to limit the maintenance costs linked to equipment that has become obsolete and to support applications that are ever more energy-intensive?

Actions within the reach of all companies

The commitment to sobriety, signed in October 2022 by French digital players or those operating in France, provides avenues for action that all companies can take as of today. Focused on reducing energy consumption, the commitments made by the signatories notably include: