Most organizations worldwide have embraced green IT initiatives to create sustainable business models, mitigate environmental risks and build a low-carbon economy. Whether it is increasing energy efficiency in data centers, clean energy transitions, or reducing e-waste via responsible disposal and recycling — each of these green actions represents a tangible way through which positive change can be engineered to build a sustainable environment.
But, despite the bright spots, gaps exist. According to McKinsey’s 2020 Virtual Global Sustainability Summit, which saw 600+ corporate executives, policymakers, and scientists discussing a climate-resilient future in a post-pandemic world, an eye-popping 57% of respondents revealed their climate change initiatives remain unchanged in light of COVID-19.[1]
Source: McKinsey & CompanyOpens a new window
PwC’s 24th Annual Global CEO report mirrors these findings.[2] Although sustainability has been enjoying newfound attention, enhancing environmental resilience is not front and center on the corporate agenda. The survey of 5000 CEOs shows 60% of global leaders have not factored climate change into their strategic risk management activities.
Walking the Green IT Path: Don’t Go It Alone
But firms undertaking sustainability initiatives can’t go it alone. New environmental regulations are sweeping across every industry. For instance, the U.S. government plans to set a 50% emissions reduction target by 2030 for the Paris climate accord.[3] Organizations that want to put sustainability at the forefront need to build an ecosystem of partners to tide over the challenges.
Big Tech is going the distance towards building sound environmental credentials. In fact, Dell is leading the way in showing how enterprises can create a path to sustainability with broad green enterprise efforts. From setting new standards in e-waste management to a closed-loop recycling strategy and championing the use of reclaimed materials in product design and development, Dell can help enterprises drive their green ambitions.
Here are five ways organizations can leverage green IT solutions to enable transformative environmental change at scale:
1. Managing e-waste
To accelerate sustainability success in 2021 and beyond, companies should move away from the idea that all technology is immediately disposable and build sunset plans for outdated IT equipment, so it doesn’t end up in a landfill. A part of Dell’s mission on sustainability is to help companies think more responsibly about electronic waste (e-waste). Across the board, IT leaders lack a concrete plan to recycleOpens a new window aging or obsolete equipment, especially PCs and servers. Plus, few attempts are being made to sanitize data responsibly to prevent it from falling into foul hands. Dell’s Asset Recovery ServicesOpens a new window helps companies retire outdated IT equipment responsibly, reduce e-waste and minimize their environmental footprint. Meanwhile, the company’s Tech Refresh and Recycle programOpens a new window offers an opportunity to refurbish and re-use both Dell and other brand gear, which contributes to savings.
2. Using refurbished hardware
There’s little doubt that the companies could do more to work with recycled materials. The industry has a poor record when it comes to repurposing materials. While the situation is far from perfect, Dell is looking to change that. It estimates that less than 5%Opens a new window of its total product materials are currently made from recycled or renewable content. With many industries looking at ways to recycle material, Dell has already committed that by 2030, it will reuse or recycleOpens a new window an equivalent product for every product a customer buys.
The company is also pushing the sustainability envelope by putting artificial intelligence (AI) at the heart of product design. As Ed Boyd, Senior VP at Dell Technologies, notedOpens a new window recently, “We’re exploring how to use artificial intelligence to design for behavior change, predict failures, and energy efficiency. We’re working on “self-healing†devices that reconstitute or repair themselves through AI and machine learning.â€
From dashboards for IT admins to analyze the performance of their “fleet†to metrics that can guide end-users on the usefulness of products, a raft of new green IT solutions can help companies reduce the carbon footprint of their gear.
3. Working towards a circular economy
While being conscious about e-waste and leveraging energy-efficient products are steps in the right direction, more is needed for a low-carbon economy. To create an outsized effect, the industry needs to segue from a linear economy and focus on upleveling sustainability and resilience through circularity — a model aimed at maximizing product efficiencies and eliminating waste. In short, IT decision makers (ITDMs) need to build a holistic approach that goes beyond fragmented measures and look at implementing a complete systemic overhaul. For example, instead of the one-way process of recycling used components, ITDMs should look at how the supply chain can be optimized more sustainably.
The approach goes deeper. Besides considering environmental issues when manufacturing and using technology, the circularity model offers an opportunity to rethink corporate products and services and embed intelligence into products to base future business decisions before it reaches end-of-life. For instance, Dell’s vision for circularityOpens a new window entails products that can be ‘reincarnated’ and have multiple lives by enabling repeated lifecycles of reuse or upcycling.
4. Building transparency into supply chain processes
In order to build a business focused on sustainability and digital innovation, it is important to partner with companies that share the same vision and can play a strategic role to help organizations gain efficiencies, meet environmental regulations and achieve their green goals. Now more than ever, sustainably-minded organizations should leverage products and services that come from companies that have a green supply chain.
Well, it is highly likely that you are already working with suppliers who have embedded sustainability into the lifecycle of their products and services. But now, there is an even stronger motivator to take things up a notch, build transparency in product inventory right from the point of sourcing, recycling, and reinvesting materials back for reuse. Moving forward, ITDMs should do an objective evaluation of suppliers and distributors to gauge efficiency opportunities. Besides informing future decisions, transparency and visibility into the supply chain can greatly facilitate the circular economy model.
5. Controlling bandwidth consumption through edge data centers
A sharp growth in cloud-based applications and video streaming services has fueled network bandwidth consumption, resulting in higher energy usage and greater carbon emissions. The widespread use of new technologies and video-on-demand (VOD), thrust into use in the early days of the pandemic, significantly strains networks and guzzles more energy. Interestingly, Swedish researcher Anders Andrae predicts that the information and communications technology (ICT) industry could use 20% of all electricity and emit up to 5.5% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025.[4]
For all its remarkable growth, the cloud’s growing footprint also equates to more power-hungry server farms. As ITDMs mull over their cloud strategy, they should also factor in how edge data centers can support innovation, reduce network workloads, optimize energy usage for compute and storage, and in turn, curb carbon emissions, Dalia Adib, edge computing expert at STL Partners, writes in a blog.[5]
The Bottom Line
Against a lingering global health crisis that has battered the economy and derailed environmental initiatives, choosing sustainability as a business practice is no longer optional. Organizations of all sizes need to radically go beyond fragmented efforts and build a holistic strategy that puts circularity at the forefront of their business operations. Finally, it all boils down to how organizations reinvest their budgets across business units to achieve a green strategy. By partnering with an eco-conscious IT behemoth like Dell, organizations can meet their sustainability goals and even gain conclusive data to improve their environmental credentials.
Sources:
1 2020 Virtual Global Sustainability SummitOpens a new window , McKinsey
2 PwC 24th Annual Global CEO SurveyOpens a new window
3 Paris Climate Goals Failure ‘Could Cost World $600 Tn’Opens a new window by Barron’s
4 ‘Tsunami of data’ could consume one fifth of global electricity by 2025Opens a new window , Climate Change News
5 Edge computing: Changing the balance of energy consumption in networksOpens a new window by STL Partners