Environmentally sustainable services
The Greening Government Commitments require government to reduce the CO2 emissions and waste caused by its information technology.
You should work to reduce your service’s impact to an environmentally sustainable level. This is important to avoid contributing unnecessarily to harmful biodiversity loss, global heating and negative impacts on people’s health and wellbeing.
To help you understand, reduce and mitigate the environmental impact of your services, you should:
- measure your service’s emissions and other environmental impacts throughout its lifecycle, and report them to your department
- have a plan for reducing environmental impacts which is in line with departmental goals
Understanding the impact of your service, suppliers and users
You should seek to understand the environmental impact of all aspects of your service.
This includes the impact of your service and operations, such as:
- mining resources, manufacturing, maintenance and transportation
- generating power for and disposing of hardware - including servers, routers and optical fibres
- generating power for software - including storing and moving data
It also includes the impact of your suppliers’ and users’ activities, across all channels, for example:
- downloading files and software
- buying new hardware
- travel and transport, and postal services
- lighting and heating
- physical materials they use, like paper
The National Grid explains the different kinds of emissions that companies create. The Technology Carbon Standard can help you identify and reduce emissions.
Software, hardware and power
You should design software to require minimal processing power and water consumption from server cooling systems. For example, you can:
- reduce servers’ energy use by caching and using content delivery networks
- use energy efficient software, hardware and infrastructure
- reuse, recycle or maximise the lifespan of hardware
- dispose of hardware effectively
- use renewable energy sources for powering data centres and computing resources
- minimise the use of high-energy content, such as video and AI
Data use
To minimise the impacts from data storage and transmission, use efficient data handling practices.
Use data compression and aggregation to reduce how much storage and bandwidth is needed.
Regularly review and retire the data you hold to help reduce its volume and impact.
Choosing third party suppliers
When you invite third party suppliers to bid for projects, you should make sure they:
- explain their proposal’s environmental impact
- show how they will reduce and minimise the environmental impact
You should use this information when choosing suppliers. For example, you could give more weight to suppliers whose proposals have the most sustainable environmental impact, or you could work with chosen suppliers to reduce their proposal’s environmental impact.
Read more about third party suppliers and sustainability in the Greening Government Commitments.