Drivers for a sustainable IT agenda

Although technology solutions can help solve environmental issues, the IT industry contributes significantly to the world’s carbon footprint and e-waste. Tech is a huge electricity consumer and most of the industry does not have a strategy for making its use sustainable. When running on non-renewable energy sources, electricity becomes a proxy for direct carbon emission. Equally important, we also need to ensure that the products and services we procure are produced under fair market conditions and that we use responsible materials.

For example, Bitcoin mining consumes roughly 0.5% of the world’s energy consumption, approximately 91 terawatt-hours annually. This astronomical consumption is more than Finland, a country of 5.5 million people, and seven times more than Google’s total usage (Kim 2021). In just 5 years, we have seen exponential growth by a factor of 10. Until the middle of last year, China was home to a significant...