FEATURE : GREEN TECHNOLOGY
Can businesses achieve net zero without sustainable IT ?
Strictly speaking , yes – it is possible to achieve net zero while still maintaining an environmentally expensive IT infrastructure , but only if a company invests in a carbon offsetting programme to balance out its emissions . It ’ s technically possible , but in a world of readily available renewable energy , and circular programmes to cut the carbon cost of acquiring hardware , it ’ s hard to imagine a world in which it would make sense to do so . each one of those new laptops costs 331kg of CO 2
, uses 190,000 litres of water , and requires 1,200kg of earth and rock to be mined all before it ’ s taken out of the box . Now considering that by 2028 , the number of laptops sold in the UK alone is expected to hit 4.2 million units ; that ’ s some 1.4 million metric tons of CO 2 pumped into the atmosphere each year from the purchase of new devices .
Steve Haskew , Head of Sustainability and Social Leadership at Circular Computing
Let ’ s take the humble laptop as an example . Three-infive UK workers use a laptop or desktop device at work ;
If someone were to offset that number using a popular approach , such as planting trees , we would need to
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