6 Steps all companies should follow to decrease their digital impact

Published in

Decathlon Digital

9 min readNov 23, 2020

Digital Technologies emits 4% of the worldwide greenhouse gas and equals the ones of the civil aviation

IT’s environmental impact will increase by 3 times between 2010 and 2025 (1).
If Digital were a country, it will be the 3rd largest consumer of electricity (2).
3.8 million Google searches every minute (3),
4 Billion people connected worldwide (4),
40 billion is the number of digital equipment in the world (5).

Numbers that make you dizzy but that have a physical, social and especially environmental reality.
We all have a responsibility (as citizens and as employees) for our uses and the equipment that provides access to those services.
From the extraction of rare earths in Ivory Coast, through manufacturing in Asia and sale and use in our countries, our digital equipment travels 804 thousand km or 20 times around the world (6).

Experts on the subject expect the resources needed for digital technology to be depleted in less than 40 years.

So, what are we going to focus on? Watching a funny cat video on YouTube or saving patients through telemedicine ?

Deleting emails is no longer enough to commit to responsible digital, we must have a more global and widespread vision.

Through these 6 steps, I will propose an action plan and a feedback on how to approach the topic of Green IT within your company. I will also explain the way Decathlon has taken up the topics as well as the difficulties to overcome.

STEP 1: Company’s strategy
STEP 2: Enlighten
STEP 3: Measure
STEP 4: Action Plan
STEP 5: Eco Design
STEP 6: Low Tech

Becoming efficient and adapting your habits thanks to digital sustainability, is the purpose of this article.

Step 1: Company’s strategy

The consideration of environmental responsibility in companies is no longer to be questioned.

In this context, the Green IT strategy must be integrated into all of the company’s digital and CSR stakeholders. Starting without the support of management would be a laudable desire but would consume too much energy compared to the stakes and the actions to be taken.

Green IT is not a “project” but a long-term responsibility for the environmental challenges of the digital world.

It should not be a temporary mission but either a position or a percentage of a dedicated position.

If you still need to convince your company of the merits of this approach, there’s no need to start with big, committed speeches.

The main advantages of this approach:

the economic gains brought by the reduction of impacts (savings), which will be detailed later on.
Brand image with its customers
Employability of the new generations in a tense digital context. The new generations are sensitive to the CSR commitment of the companies in which they will work.
Long-term business resilience

At Decathlon, we base ourselves on the following organization:

Two persons working on the subject in partial time (30% and 20%)
Integrated into the CSR decision circle
Integrated into the IT System Department decision circle
A community of committed relays to disseminate the various topics more effectively.

Step 2 : Enlighten

The first action to be carried out with company employees is to

Make dematerialization visible.

What are the environmental, social and societal impacts caused by the daily and long-term use of digital technology? How does this apply to companies?

1 — The subject of email can be used as a simple way to launch the debate — even if we will see later that the impact is negligible — and start integrating the approach into their daily lives.

2 — Enlightening your employees on the impact that their use of digital technology will have on their work will raise awareness, and gradually, both changes in habits and more judicious choices will be made (do I really need a third screen to do my job?).

Don’t forget that the impacts expressed in terms of quantity of CO2 isn’t representative for your employees, so think about using comparisons. For example: :

Annual impact of a computer = 120kg of CO2eq = 1 000 km by car (7)

3 — Involve them, in a workshop where they will be able to discover their impacts themselves, and find action plans at their level (individual and team). This can be integrated into team meetings for example.

4 — Then, comes the stage where we begin to address the subject of measuring individual numerical impact. It is important for the user to be able to find simple but effective action levers to question his or her current impacts.

Decrease their online storage, select their computer, an extra screen… So many questions they will be able to ask themselves.

Concrete actions we do at Decathlon:

Implementation of an individual numerical impact calculator (https://co2-digital-calculator.web.app). Open Source tool (8)
Cyber WorldClean Up Day (https://cyberworldcleanupday.fr)
Presentation of the Green IT topic to other teams during team meetings
Integration in company newsletters (sending specific newsletters is counterproductive)
Original communication in the form of comic books
Creation of an Intranet website presenting the various actions launched
Certifying training on Responsible Digital

Original Communication in the form of comic books ©Decathlon

A dedicated web based tool to calculate your Digital environmental impact ©Decathlon

Step 3: Measure

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”. W. Edwards Deming

Users have started to measure their impact, and it is now interesting to go further and broaden the scope (service / region / country / world).

How do you measure, and what do you measure?

A methodology needs to be defined:

Scope
Environmental indicators (energy, GHG, tension over fresh water, resource depletion … )
Workstations: infrastructure (datacenter, cloud, etc.), user environment (devices, printing, etc.), Information System flows (waste, power consumption, etc.).
Services: ecommerce website, ERP, GED …
Frequency of measurement (once a year is a minimum)

It is possible to be accompanied to measure the environmental impact of the information system by specialized companies

If you wish to animate yourself on a more regular basis on particular indicators, it is entirely possible to monitor those indicators (such as the lifespan of the equipment or the number of screens in the company).

At Decathlon, we participated in the WeGreenIT study of the Green IT Club (now called “Institute for Sustainable IT” — https://institutnr.org) to help us in the methodology, and this allowed us to compare ourselves with other participating companies.

The results are as follows:

Environmental impact per user ©Decathlon

Step 4: Action Plan

“Nothing becomes more important just because you can measure it. It becomes more measurable, that’s all.”

The previous step will have identified your strengths and weaknesses in each area.

This will enable the development of an action plan, for example by prioritizing the areas where the impact is the greatest and where easily identifiable actions can be implemented.

The manufacturing of equipment is what weighs most heavily on the digital environmental bill. Extending their lifespan must therefore be a priority action when you write an action plan.

Also, think about making an inventory of the servers, shutting down those that are no longer used, shutting down pre-production servers at night and on weekends if they are not used during these time slots.

These action plans must be accompanied by monitoring and result indicators, objectives and must be the subject of a regularly updated dashboard.

During the implementation of the action plan, you are going to need colleagues closest to the emission sources: buyers, computer/phone park managers, etc…
It is therefore necessary to pay particular attention to the enlightening and training of these stakeholders. If you want them to help you and go in your direction, they must share your convictions. When you encounter obstacles, (because yes, there will be) having the support of management will be even more essential.

Surround yourself!

Many of your employees are concerned about the future of our planet, are individually committed, and would be delighted to commit to this topic in their company. It is also an opportunity for your employees to clear their minds by getting away from their daily tasks.

At Decathlon, a Green IT community has been created, where information is shared and where each member is invited to collaborate and share ideas.

Here are a few examples from Decathlon’s action plan:

encourage the purchase of labeled equipment,
reduce the number of screens per user,
reduce the frequency of replacement and offer reconditioned equipment in the catalog
Promote reuse through reconditioning,
Donation of material to associations (for instance with Emmaüs-Connect in France…)

Step 5: Eco Design

Eco-designing digital services means integrating environmental, social and economic stakes right from the design step of an application.

The accessibility of the digital services is allowed through two means:

1 — Physical Accessibility: helps to overcome disabilities through assistive technologies, such as magnification tools for the visually impaired or screen readers for the hearing impaired. The W3C has published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 (https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/) Tools exist to test your site, such as: https://wave.webaim.org

This topic will be the subject of a next article.

2 — Digital Accessibility: that is to put yourself in the worst conditions of access to the network (ex: 2G / bad ADSL connection) and simulate the use of your service.

If the service works correctly in a degraded version, it will be widely accessible in a broadband version.

The development part is addressed by a qualitative and quantitative approach:

Performance-optimized code: (https://collectif.greenit.fr/ecoconception-web/115-bonnes-pratiques-eco-conception_web.html ) French Version
Less code, fewer plugins and a more frugal approach of development
E.g.: why having several analytics on your website?
Have minimum scripts, a clean but efficient design to find information quickly.
Manage a data life cycle (database / pictures / logs …)

The last point but not the least, is the functionality. Each feature must be challenged by the Product Owner, by the developers and by the users to have the simplest possible application without useless features.

To sum up, eco-design is:

Steps of Eco Design reduction estimation ©Decathlon

Any functionality that is not implemented should not be developed and should not be hosted.

The environmental impact is therefore very important in the first part, and then is declined on the different stages of development

At Decathlon, we have launched a digital service impact calculator

https://ecodesignwebcalculator.web.app (still beta version) to measure the impact of a functional unit (the service provided by the digital service)

We have also launched an internal eco designed label for Newsletter to minimize the impact of our communications (some criteria are: smaller and compressed images, newsletter weight in kb, DOM complexity …)

Step 6 : Low-Tech

To go further, take the low-tech path. The term Low-tech is used to describe objects, systems, techniques, services, know-how, and practices that integrate technology according to three main principles: Utility, Accessibility, Sustainability.

Thinking Low Tech means thinking about the long-term resilience of your business.

The low tech joins the principles of eco-design on frugality, optimization of functionality but pushes these concepts to its paroxysm.

How to use as few resources as possible while delivering the same service? This type of question is going to multiply in the coming years and will push us to think differently about our digital developments.

Example: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com Website fully powered on battery recharged by solar panel.

Conclusion

Sustainable IT is a mindset of good sense.

It could be challenging but it will help you to improve your fundamentals needs, make your digital service more accessible and reduce your technical debts

#People #Planet #Profit

And #NewTalent

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