Guidance

Make your technology sustainable

Increase sustainability throughout the lifecycle of your technology.

From:
Central Digital and Data Office
Published
10 November 2021

To meet point 12 of the Technology Code of Practice, your plans should include how you aim to increase the sustainability of your technology project or programme by meeting the outcomes defined in the Greening Government ICT and Digital Services Strategy.

Government departments should have support from a designated digital sustainability lead. If you need further support or more information, you can contact the cross-government Sustainable Technology Advice & Reporting (STAR) team by emailing [email protected]. The STAR team coordinates cross-government reporting on sustainability. They also share advice and best practice with government organisations.

The benefits of increasing your project’s sustainability include:

Consider sustainability from the start of your project

As well as short term planning for your project’s requirements, you should aim to create a long term plan on how to increase the sustainability of your technology or service across its entire lifecycle.

At the start of your project, you should consider these questions:

  1. What are your organisation’s sustainability goals?
  2. If the contract is more than £5 million per year, has the supplier committed to meet the government’s net zero target, and published a Carbon Reduction Plan?
  3. Can you include specific project objectives to meet your organisation’s sustainability goals?
  4. Have you identified potential benefits for meeting sustainability objectives, or risks that would stop you meeting those objectives?
  5. Does your organisation have processes for recording and reporting on sustainability goals? For example, reporting on the targets for greenhouse gases, waste and water.
  6. Do your project plans include user research to more clearly define requirements and reduce the chance of buying software and hardware you do not need?
  7. Do you have a process or plan for recording the impact of future upgrades to software and hardware?
  8. Are you able to recycle or repurpose any equipment you are replacing?
  9. Are you able to use existing datasets for your project?
  10. Are there any opportunities for minimising processing, transmission and storage?
  11. Can you put in place processes which reduce printing and paper trails in back office systems and user facing services?
  12. Have you assessed whether home working is a practical and more sustainable option for your project team?

Government’s sustainability objectives

You should consider how your project or programme can work towards meeting the Greening Government ICT and Digital Services Strategy. To meet the Strategy’s main objectives, you should:

  • reduce greenhouse gas emissions
  • improve management of resources and waste
  • procure sustainable technology and digital services

To help meet these objectives, from 30 September 2021 suppliers for new procurements worth more than £5 million per year must commit to reaching Net Zero by 2050, and publish a Carbon Reduction Plan. You can read more details in ‘Procurement Policy Note 06/21: Taking account of Carbon Reduction Plans in the procurement of major government contracts’.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions

Your project’s energy requirements will affect your project’s sustainability. To improve this and significantly reduce your costs you should:

  • use public cloud - this can reduce emissions as cloud suppliers aim to use resources more efficiently and sometimes use a green energy provider
  • optimise your cloud use - by managing your cloud spending you will also use less energy
  • audit your data to check for duplicate data sets - this might be a separate project if you’re dealing with a lot of data sets and find that some are legacy items
  • keep an audit of your live environments and switch off unnecessary environments when possible, such as unused test environments
  • decommission unnecessary systems your project might replace

If you’re creating user facing services, you can design them to use less energy if you:

  • help people using your service succeed first time to reduce task repetition
  • use less multimedia, if user research identifies this possibility
  • choose multimedia formats that use less energy, such as standard definition rather than high definition videos
  • use the HTML publishing format instead of PDFs - along with accessibility issues, PDFs can use more energy as they’re more likely to take longer to load and to use
  • avoid collecting information you do not need, to reduce the amount of server space your service uses

You should also consider how your project will measure, manage, and improve its sustainability during the project, and after it has become business as usual. Discuss with the STAR team and decide how you can:

  • maintain the service or system
  • optimise live systems so they use appropriate power and storage
  • identify new opportunities for making better use of data sharing and processing
  • report on your project’s progress against the sustainability goals and include the results in your organisation’s annual environmental report

Improve your management of resources and waste

Buying a service or managed service is usually the most sustainable option. If you have purchased physical equipment or infrastructure for your project, you should consider how to maintain and dispose of them. When assessing options for disposal, you should consider:

  • if sustainable disposal options are available, such as buy-back schemes
  • if other projects or programmes within government can reuse the ICT
  • if you can replace technology with remanufactured ICT
  • whether you can recycle non-reusable ICT

You can contact the STAR team by emailing [email protected] for specific advice or help identifying opportunities for reusing physical technology.

Procuring sustainable technology and digital services

When you’re buying physical equipment or infrastructure, you should consult with your organisation’s commercial and sustainability leads to understand what sustainable procurement options are available. You can also contact the Crown Commercial Service to find out how to buy more sustainably.

When discovering your project or programmes requirements, consider if you can:

  • reduce how much cloud storage and data processing your project or programme uses
  • use remanufactured or recycled technology
  • maximise the lifespan of the equipment used by your system or service
  • optimise the energy usage of your project or programmes equipment or infrastructure

Updates to this page

Published 10 November 2021

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