IT systems play a major role in climate change.
What if we could all play a part in reducing the damage? The good news: we can and we’ll show you how.
A few months after witnessing the extreme drought situation in the Drâa Valley, Morocco, I attended Devoxx Conference in Antwerp. This was before the AI wave, full of inspiring sustainability talks which opened my eyes: having already made personal lifestyle changes to reduce my environmental impact, I needed ways to mitigate my professional impact. Devoxx talks—such as Towards a carbon aware cloud and The Fast and the Sustainable: Unleash the Power of Sustainable IT & High Performance Green Code—inspired me and motivated me to introduce the Green IT topic at Migros Online.
2030 is just around the corner, leaving us with less than 5 years until the first milestone of the Paris Agreement. Unfortunately, we are far from being on track to meet the agreement's goal of limiting global temperature rise to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.
Digital technologies are responsible for 4% of the Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, overtaking the aviation industry. With increasing access to these technologies, especially in emerging countries, this figure is expected to rise exponentially. However our environmental impact extends beyond GHG emissions, and our digital habits impact various domains. The 9 planetary boundaries illustrate what is at stakes:
Most of the figures and reports regarding the impact of digital activities were published before generative AI became a thing. The substantial consumption of electricity, water and rare earth metals by AI systems makes any sustainability objective even more difficult to achieve and thus every sustainability effort even more important.
In this article we will go over the goals of Green IT, the benefits of a sustainable IT strategy and how we started implementing this strategy at Migros Online.
Why Green IT?
Green IT is a discipline aiming at minimising the environmental impact of digital systems. For an online retailer such as Migros Online, IT systems might only be a small portion of the overall environmental footprint. So why do we consider it to be important?
As the saying goes, we have to start somewhere, and green IT is a good starting point because many potential mitigations are easy to enact. Employees will have a positive impact by adapting their digital practices. Raising awareness helps build a broader understanding of sustainability, which in turn leads to lower energy consumption and reduced operational costs.
As AI becomes part of our daily routine, it is necessary to fully understand the impact of our actions to prevent the environmental impact from skyrocketing.
Companies have power, companies have impact. If you have power and impact, hopefully you also take the responsibility that goes with that.
— Feike Sybesma, Chair of the Supervisory Board, Royal Philips
After gaining the support of management, a bunch of people ready to roll up their sleeves gathered: Migros Online’s Green IT Guild was born.
Where do we start?
Since the beginning our objectives were clear: raise awareness among our peers and decrease the environmental impact of Migros Online digital systems.
However, the path to achieving those goals was much fuzzier. How could we make this happen based on some ideas sketched on a Miro board?
A little research made obvious that we needed a baseline—calculating the environmental impact of an IT system is a complex task that we would not achieve on our own. The digital environmental footprint of a company includes more than just the software it builds and the infrastructure behind it. It also covers all the digital systems and devices the employees use for their daily work: laptops, monitors, internal softwares (business, HR, product related, development, communication, wiki, etc.).
Additionally, when evaluating the impact of a system, we must consider the following three phases:
- 🏭 Manufacturing: mining of earth metals, hardware production, etc
- 💻 Usage: either by end-users or in data centers
- 🚮 End-of-life: disposal or recycling of the devices
We cannot improve what we cannot measure
Consequently we searched for experts, ideally a local company familiar with the Swiss market. We decided to partner with Mikujy, whose CEO and founder is currently the only person in Switzerland certified as a Sustainable IT expert. Our first objective with Mikujy was to conduct an audit which would provide us with the needed baseline and with an actionable plan.
Our action plan
The audit report in hand, we began addressing the most impactful items of the action plan:
- Raising awareness
- Cloud processes and data storage
- Hardware renewal and purchases
Raising awareness
A key outcome of the audit was the need for awareness: empowered people make informed decisions. This can be achieved by providing training, impactful and relevant content, as well as communicating actively on Green IT topics.
None of us being environment specialists, we decided to involve external parties and rely on existing large-scale events:
- Inspired by the Digital cleanup day, we launched the “Digital cleanup week” at Migros Online, encouraging employees to declutter their mailboxes, sharepoint, and other online storage systems. This simple action revealed that deleted emails were, in fact, never removed from the global system.
- Mikujy presented a Green IT webinar open to every office employee
- We started publishing ISIT (Institute for Sustainable IT) online MOOC in our internal channels
We also started creating our own content and organising internal events:
- We gave a talk about the environmental impacts of AI and provided recommendations for a more efficient usage
- We ran a sustainable IT challenge during our internal hack days
- Sustainability was one of the jugement criteria for the internal hack days projects
We plan to continue promoting awareness by offering such content and challenges on a regular basis.
Cloud processes and data storage
The audit revealed a substantial volume of legacy data residing in the cloud, with 357 TB of data stored on GCP. Data engineers identified the most costly and environmentally harmful project, cleansed it from Migros Online’s data and processes, and returned it to its rightful owner. This allows us to save 3000 CHF per month and reduce our carbon emissions by 23t CO2eq, which is 14% of our systems emissions.
Moving forward, data engineers will revise the tracking data retention policy and evaluate other significant projects to further minimize their footprint.
In addition to data cleanup, we can apply temporal and spatial shifting to our cloud processes:
- 🕐 Temporal Shifting: Running tasks when electricity is sourced from green energy, such as solar panels or wind turbines.
- ☀️ Spatial Shifting: Relocating tasks in regions powered by green energy.
GCP provides a list of their cloud regions indicating the carbon-free energy ratio and grid carbon intensity. If a low-carbon region can meet our service needs, we should consider relocating our tasks there.
Hardware renewal and purchases
Renewing hardware at a certain frequency is highly desirable but has a significant impact. The largest part of the environmental impact of an end-user device occurs during manufacturing, while the impact during the usage phase is negligible:
"Outdated" laptops are resold to a refurbishing company. However, as long as we keep renewing hardware as frequently, new devices must be produced. No matter what happens once the warranty has expired: whether the laptop is refurbished or thrown away, it has to be replaced with a brand new one.
In our consumer-driven society, we need to distinguish the wish from the need. Who hasn’t eagerly awaited the last MacBook release? Who is not thrilled about unpacking a brand new pristine device? Most of our laptops still run effectively after their warranty expires and we want to encourage our employees to make a sustainable choice by extending the lifespan of their laptop to:
- ☁️ Reduce carbon emissions: through research of 230 laptops the average CO² emissions during production of a new laptop is 331kg where the majority of emissions come from production and materials used. More here: What Is The Carbon Footprint Of A Laptop?
- 🛠️ Reduce mining of earth metals: half of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the production of the graphics cards comes from the mining of earth metals
- 🌪️ Reduce pollution: producing 1 ton of rare earth elements produces 2000 tons of toxic waste
- 🌊 Save water: Approximately 39 million liters of ultra pure water is used daily by an average chip manufacturing facility, which is equivalent to the water used by 125’000 Swiss households daily
- 🚮 Avoid producing e-waste: only 17% of global e-waste is documented to be collected and properly recycled. E-waste ends up in landfills where it releases chemicals contaminating water, soil and air, endangering people and wildlife. More about e-waste: The Growing Environmental Risks of E-Waste
This table illustrates how our environmental footprint would decrease when extending the lifespan of laptops beyond the 3 year warranty:
| Devices lifespan | 4 years | 5 years |
|---|---|---|
| Carbon emissions | -6 tons co2eq | -10 tons co2eq |
| Water consumption | -14% | -22% |
| Soils pollution | -17% | -26% |
| Abiotic resources consumption | -4% | -7% |
Next Steps
Website optimisations
An audit of the 20 most visited pages on our website showed that its footprint is already quite low compared to our overall footprint. However, implementing eco-design principles where possible will be beneficial, and we are eager to dig into the the green software patterns recommended by the Green Software Foundation. In addition to reducing the ecological footprint of our website, eco-design principles should
- improve the user experience: lighter and more efficient pages results in a smoother browsing experience
- reduce hosting and maintenance costs: less resources and less bandwidth should decrease associated costs
Governance
In addition to the KPIs provided by Mikujy, we are developing our own set of KPIs to effectively monitor our progress and impact within the company.
We also intend to communicate more frequently about our actions and successes.
Roadmap
We drafted a roadmap running until 2027. This roadmap will evolve together with the outcome of the next internal audit we intend to run early next year.
Conclusion
Companies and their employees might be torn between AI and sustainability. However we cannot consider one at the expense of the other. AI has become part of most companies' toolbox, making the need for sustainable actions even more urgent. In addition to making our future possible, those sustainable actions will also reduce operational costs: usually making a smarter usage of resources leads to lower financial expenditures.
We strongly believe that by fostering awareness and implementing concrete actions we will make sustainability part of Migros Online core values.
As the Green IT guild we hope to be an example within the company but we also hope to influence others in the industry.
About the author
My name is Aurélia and I’ve been at Migros Online for more than 10 years, first as a front-end engineer, then as a team lead, and today as a staff software engineer.
I gained interest in the impact of digital technologies after attending the Devoxx conference in Antwerp in 2023. Having already made personal lifestyle changes to reduce my environmental impact, I sought ways to mitigate my professional impact and I am glad to lead the Green IT topic at Migros Online.
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