I’ve had an exciting week so far (and it’s only Thursday), in a good way rather than a bad exciting week (which sometimes happens but is less fun….!). We had 3 new interns join us in DLAM (David, Hera and Otis) more about that in a future blog post) to join Tallulah who is continuing with us.
You may remember last year I posted a blog post (‘The impact of our services on the environment‘) where I talked about some thoughts on the services my team and I manage and a conversation we had (including Osh, Chris and Catalina – last year’s WAC Green Interns) with Amazon about their cloud hosting and some reflections about my own digital hoarding problem.
Well, part of my excitement this week is that Otis has joined DLAM as our new DLAM Green Web Platforms Intern. Osh is returning to WAC this summer and continuing the excellent work he’s been doing on sustainability on our University web platform and has been a fantastic person to bounce ideas off and I’m excited that he and Otis will work together this summer.
Another part of my excitement is that I went to a conference! Well, ok, I didn’t ‘go’ … it was an online one about digital sustainability. UCISA’s 2025 Digital Sustainability Conference …and it was awesome… and a bit depressing both at the same time.
The conversations were wide ranging covering the entire digital sustainability life cycle – from design and creating hardware, building data centres, running data centres, running digital services, disposal of digital hardware and end-of-life of digital content. There were presentations about AI, IoT and other innovations and I learned a lot I didn’t already know including some things that made me very sad.
Sessions that chimed with me
Shaping agendas for the more sustainable use of digital technologies in universities- Susan Brown, Lecturer and Programme Director of Education for a Sustainable Environment, University of Manchester
Susan talked about the problems of mining the minerals we need for devices, the problems with disposal and a new course they were developing at Manchester about Sustainable Educational Technology. Susan raised the topic of rethinking about how we use technology and set the scene for the rest of the day – there was really a theme about considering the purpose of using technology before you use it.
Scope 3 emissions: What do they mean for IT? – Paul Rock, Consultant
Paul shared some really interesting numbers and stats in this presentation, which I found fascinating. For example, he compared a university which spent around a £1M improving their datacentres Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and reduced their carbon impact by 134 tonnes per year to an imaginary university with 7000 laptops which extends the replacement cycle by 2 years, from 5 to 7 and them saving a similar amount on their carbon impact. Obviously there are other things to consider here (older laptops are less environmentally friendly typically and there are often software and security reasons to upgrade more frequently) but it’s an interesting point. Paul shocked me by mentioning that ‘sustainable energy’ includes shipping wood pellets over from Canada and burning them to create the energy. This was something I didn’t know and was massively disappointing to me to hear given how polluting bring that amount of wood over from Canada is, given it’s cutting down trees, given it’s burning them and releasing pollution into the environment.
AI and Sustainability: Environmental and Social Impacts – John Vass-de-Zomba, IT Environmental Sustainability Manager, University of Manchester
John reflected on where AI’s impact the environment – any compute power needs more resources and impacts the environment, not just AI. However, John also talked about the fact that the demand for AI was huge and the growth expected was massive. He also talked about the lifecycle issues again – supply chain impact, operations, disposal and then the other negative general impacts like slave labour, IP infringement, biases, loss of privacy and longer term job displacement. He interestingly highlighted AI tech is a loss-leader and it’s interesting as to why the companies keep pushing them. He also covered all the other environmental impacts like emissions, habitat degradation and water consumption.
One of the audience made a very good point which I have considered often myself:
‘..and how many are just happening in apps, search results etc which people do not ask for but happen none the less?’
I think this is happening as suppliers try to ‘justifying their own existence’. I touched on this in my previous post ‘When AI is not intelligent‘. More and more we find AI in places we didn’t ask for it, we don’t want it and we can’t switch it off. The other annoyance for me about this is how much it’s costing behind the scene and how we’ll end up paying for it (because we will, even if we don’t want it).
How a data strategy can help you deliver a more sustainable campus – Oliver Ramsey, Lead Statistical Analyst, University of Bristol
This was totally outside my comfort zone but really interesting. Oliver talked about making small changes to make a big impact on their carbon impact. They had added smart technology and monitors around campus and had created some fantastic looking PowerBI reports to report on the measurements and the cost savings. Some of the savings were made by automatically switching things off when people weren’t around for example. Small investments in sensors easily paying for themselves and longer term reducing costs.
Becoming efficient: What happens when we can’t go any faster?- Osh Doherty, Green Web Estate Intern, The University of Edinburgh
I always think about things differently after a conversation with Osh and his presentation was no different. He sensibly pointed out that making our technology/buildings as efficient as possible will only get us so far. We also need to reduce the resources we need – so going back again to considering whether we need to do something or not. Osh pointed out we sometimes are less aware of the impact of digital on the environment and people forget that it’s not actually free (even if the cost isn’t visible). So that means we build things/created things/store it and forget and never re-use. He pointed out that small design decisions can make a big difference – ie on web pages with millions of hits, making a small reduction in the size of images has an positive impact that adds up and it all helps.
There were lots of other interesting presentations around the impact of personal devices or the supply chain on the environment. I’ve not covered the details of them here but happy to chat about them if you have an interest in them.
Take-aways
I must admit I really enjoyed learning a new acronym today – ROT. Redundant, Obselete or Trivial. ie ‘Get rid of the ROT in your VLE’. This will be my new catch-phrase.
We need to consider the full lifecycle of digital services and infrastructure. We use tech for more and more things. It needs more power. Building data centres really impacts the environment. The more innovation, the higher the spec of computer/infrastructure we need. We need to balance information security (ie reusing older kit sometimes butts up against patching and new versions of operating systems). The more innovation, again the more minerals we take from the earth to provide the tech to be innovative. All of this typically costs more – even if the costs aren’t direct, you can bet we’ll need to pay indirectly (or later!).
We are rubbish at recycling. We are rubbish at repairing (often it costs more to repair than replace, this makes me sad). We are terrible digital hoarders (and I STILL include myself in that). As Osh reminds us – we should be considering what we are doing and whether we really need to do it.
I’m excited to see what Otis (and Osh) can come up with this summer. Otis has already been suggesting possible mechanisms for improving our sustainability (yes, already, on day 3 of the internship!) for our services, and I will be listening with interest.
And yes, ironically I made an image with AI – it’s a multi-dimensional see-saw. There are so many trade-offs here, that’s what it feels like. Carefully balancing the environment against functionality against information security against usability…. etc. I keep thinking back to the old days when bandwidth was scarce and we all compressed everything before we did anything with it. Need to go back to those days (smaller files are better for everyone and may help us save the planet).
Image by ChatGPT.
