What digital sustainability is and why it's essential for our future

It may not be as obvious as driving a car or heating a home, but technology has an environmental impact too. This is especially true in four areas:

• Data centers: Essential for storing and managing digital data, data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity to power routers, switches, firewalls, storage systems and servers. According to a McKinsey study, data centers consumed 17 GW in the United States alone in 2022. To put that in perspective, 17 GW is the same amount of wind power generated across the entire EU in 2023.

• Cryptocurrencies: Cryptocurrency mining requires substantial energy because of complex "proof of work" algorithms. In a recent survey, CBECI estimated that global electricity use tied to Bitcoin mining in 2023 was between 67 TWh and 240 TWh. That would put this activity at between 0.2% and 0.9% of global electricity demand. In other words, mining Bitcoin consumes as much as entire countries like Greece and Australia.
• Generative artificial intelligence: AI relies on training models on billions of data points, which requires huge amounts of water to cool the servers. A recent study by researchers at the University of California found that OpenAI used about 700,000 liters of fresh water to train GPT-3. That's the same amount of water needed to produce 370 BMW cars. On top of that, a simple conversation of 20 to 50 questions with ChatGPT would be equivalent to consuming a 500ml bottle of water.
• Web applications: Popular platforms such as social media require considerable computing power, contributing to global energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Specifically, research by Statista showed that scrolling on Instagram produces the equivalent of 1.55 micrograms of CO2 per minute. Admittedly, that may not sound like much. But multiply that figure by more than 500 million daily users and the amount of time spent “dumb scrolling”, and it becomes clear that the environmental impact can't be ignored.

These examples clearly show that, without sustainable design, technological innovation can have a significant environmental impact, driving up energy consumption, CO2 emissions and demand for water.

The digital transition goes hand in hand with the European Green Deal, the plan to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent. While digitalization can significantly help reduce our carbon footprint, it has to rely on sustainable technologies: the energy consumed by digital technologies must not outweigh the environmental benefits they generate.

Digital technologies account for between 8% and 10% of the EU's energy consumption and between 2% and 4% of its greenhouse gas emissions. These percentages may not seem very high, but they hide significant numbers. This underlines the importance of an integrated approach, where digitalization doesn't just drive efficiency but also respects the environment. That's where the concept of digital sustainability comes in. But what does it actually mean?

Digital sustainability is about adopting technologies and practices that reduce the environmental impact of the digital world, in both software and hardware. The concept stresses that innovation can't be driven by profit and productivity alone: it must also take into account the long-term impact of technology on the environment and society.

In software, sustainability means choosing efficient programming languages, optimizing code to use less energy and building applications that support the green movement. In hardware, it means designing devices made from recyclable materials, with longer life cycles and ever lower energy consumption.

This attention to both sides of the digital world is key to the future of our planet. The exponential growth in electronic devices, and in the time we spend on them, has inevitably driven up demand for energy and natural resources. A more sustainable approach is therefore needed, before the environmental impact of digital technologies grows even larger.

Looking at the most widely used programming languages in the world, you'll find that the top spots all belong to web technologies. Given the popularity, reach and accessibility the Internet has achieved over the last decade, that's hardly a surprise.

To better understand what digital sustainability is and how to put it into practice, it makes sense to focus on the web. Time to discover the three best strategies for making websites and online applications more sustainable!

One thing that rarely comes to mind when talking about web development is how much energy a website consumes in production. As shown by a paper written jointly by several universities, this is closely tied to the programming language chosen to build the site.

By assigning the world's most popular programming languages a normalized score based on energy consumption, time and memory, the researchers compiled the following table:

As you can see, to run the same code, Python tends to consume a whopping 76 times more energy than C!

If you're not familiar with programming languages, the takeaway from this study is that high-level languages like Python and Ruby tend to be less sustainable than low-level languages like Rust and C. That's because languages that operate at a level of abstraction closer to the hardware are inevitably more efficient than those operating at a higher level of abstraction. Low-level languages therefore require less energy, but they're also much harder to use.

The same study also found that slower applications consume more energy and are therefore less sustainable for the environment. Sustainability on the web starts with well-optimized websites and web applications.

The goal is to build high-performing sites, both in terms of the code and algorithms used and in terms of page size. Very large web pages, with images and other heavy assets, take longer to load on users' devices and consume more energy as a result. That translates into more CO2.

That's why it's essential to use advanced technologies designed for building lightweight, highly optimized web applications.

As explained above, digital sustainability isn't just about software, it's also about hardware. Writing efficient code isn't enough if it then runs on servers with outdated, energy-hungry components. The effort put into development could be canceled out by the CO2 produced to power those servers. Choosing an environmentally conscious web hosting service is just as crucial.

The provider you choose should guarantee the use of renewable energy sources or offset CO2 by purchasing carbon credits, minimizing the overall environmental impact. It's no coincidence that both AWS and Google Cloud, two of the best-known cloud providers in the world, are committed to offering their customers sustainable plans that let them measure the emissions they produce and minimize their carbon footprint.

A responsible hosting provider strikes a balance between reducing environmental impact and delivering robust, reliable hosting solutions.

Building a sustainable web project, or optimizing a website to meet the environmental targets set by the EU, can't be improvised. It takes the support of a digital partner with years of experience in the digital industry and a genuine commitment to sustainability, just like Cantiere Creativo.

By adopting cutting-edge technologies and working with a 100% remote team, which cuts down on travel and therefore CO2 emissions, Cantiere Creativo is a calm company that drives highly innovative projects without losing sight of their impact on the environment.

It's no coincidence that the Dipartimento per la trasformazione digitale chose Cantiere Creativo to redesign its website, which now loads in under 0.4 seconds and uses less energy than ever, both on the servers and on users' devices. Learn more in our case study.

Technology is constantly evolving, and so is the world of digital sustainability. That's why it's essential to stay up to date through institutional resources and/or resources from industry experts, such as:

• Fondazione per la Sostenibilità Digitale: The first research foundation in Italy dedicated to analyzing the links between digital transformation and sustainability, with the goal of helping institutions and businesses build a better future.
• Shaping Europe's digital future: The blog dedicated to the EU's green transition, featuring the European Commission's initiatives for building tomorrow's digital infrastructure.
• “Sostenibilità digitale”: A book by Stefano Epifani, president of the Fondazione per la Sostenibilità Digitale and professor at the University of Pavia, on why sustainability can't be separated from digital transformation.
• Sustainable Web Manifesto: A public manifesto for a shared commitment to building a sustainable Internet, recognizing that if the Internet were a country, it would be the fourth largest polluter in the world.

In this article, you've learned what digital sustainability is and why it's one of the key themes of the European Union's green policies. After all, technological innovation has driven an exponential increase in demand for energy and for the natural resources needed to produce it and to cool servers.

All of this has a significant impact on our planet, which is why action is needed on both the software and hardware side to minimize the environmental impact of digital, especially on the web. That's where the experience of a successful digital partner comes in, to design and build web projects that are innovative and highly sustainable too.

Thanks for reading! Get in touch with any requests, comments or proposals.