The first steps towards sustainable digitalisation

So, you've decided to explore steps you could take to limit your company's IT impact on the environment? Here's the place to start, and you'll find all the tools you can use to help you along the way.

Establish a preliminary diagnosis

To come up with an effective plan of action, establish any relevant KPIs and determine your priorities. It's important to first come up with an impact analysis.

There are a few different evaluation tools you can use to help you form a preliminary diagnosis:

• The INR Calculator for estimating your environmental footprint in kg of CO₂
• EcoDiag for evaluating the impact of manufacturing and transporting of IT equipment stock
• The IS footprint assessment tool, for measuring the carbon footprint of information systems
• ADEME's Base Empreinte® (FR) , a public emission factors database, which you'll need for creating a greenhouse gas emissions analysis
• The OpenLCA, an open-source  sustainability and lifecycle analysis tool

Reconsider your equipment policy

Most of the IT sector's environmental footprint comes from manufacturing devices. There are a number of measures companies can take to limit the impact of their computer equipment, such as:

• Favouring reuse and recycling: choose suppliers that offer recycling options for their end-of-life IT equipment, or use Recupel collection points. Some equipment, such as laptops and smartphones, can be given a second life by donating them to local economic players (like associations and schools).
• Draw up well-reasoned purchasing policies: avoid purchasing unnecessary or redundant computer equipment, and get rid of automatic renewal policies.
• Encourage best practices: encourage employees to adopt good IT equipment habits, such as using recycled paper and deleting unnecessary emails.
• Choose sustainable suppliers: opt for suppliers with sustainable environmental practices, and take environmental certifications and waste management policies such as EnergyStar, TCO, and Epeat into account.

Think eco-design

When you're launching or taking on a new digital tool, think eco-design!

It's a simple concept: assess any essential requirements that products or services must meet before they are designed, in order to take their environmental and social impact into account throughout their life cycle. By applying the principles of eco-design to digital products, you can develop and use only the things you really need, and leave anything unnecessary behind.

This stands to benefit businesses in many ways: less complicated digital services offer an optimised user experience, they're less expensive to develop, and they have a reduced environmental footprint. This approach benefits the company's image, the environment, and users.

To follow eco-design principles, you need to take the following conditions into account:

• Save resources: reduce the requirements for resources, like energy, bandwidth, storage space, etc. to manufacture and use products.
• Reduce the use phase environmental impact of the product: you could optimise its functionalities to reduce server requests and data transmission as much as possible, for example.
• Sustainability: design sustainable products which can be used for a long time and updated or recycled at the end of their life.
• Social responsibility: take the social impacts of producing IT products into account, making sure to respect user's rights and that any data collection and use is made transparent.