Green IT: reduce your digital footprint

Digital technology accounts for 3-4% of global CO₂ emissions. Here's how your company can take concrete action on its environmental impact. Digital: an underestimated impact: The global digital sector represents 3-4% of greenhouse gas emissions, as much as civil aviation. Contrary to popular belief, 70-80% of this impact comes from equipment manufacturing, not usage. Digital sobriety starts with extending hardware lifespan. 5 action levers for SMEs: 1) Extend equipment lifespan (5-7 years instead of 3). 2) Optimise code and infrastructure. 3) Rationalise data. 4) Choose committed hosts (PUE < 1.3, renewable energy). 5) Raise employee awareness. Eco-design in software: An eco-designed website consumes 2-10 times less energy. Principles: limit page weight (< 1 MB ideally), reduce server requests, optimise images (WebP, lazy loading), avoid unnecessary trackers. The French regulatory framework: The REEN law (2021) requires companies with 250+ employees to assess their IS environmental impact. These obligations will progressively extend to SMEs. Our commitment at Powehi: Digital sobriety is the 5th pillar of our charter. We eco-design every solution: optimised queries, sober hosting, lightweight code, and systematic impact measurement. Choose improvements from a baseline: Begin with an inventory of devices, hosted services, software and the main user journeys. Record a consistent baseline for the measures you can access, such as page weight, request count, storage growth, device age or service utilisation. Prioritise changes that reduce unnecessary work while preserving accessibility, reliability and the task users came to complete. After each change, repeat the same measurement and note the trade-offs. Keep the scope and method beside the result: a lighter page or lower resource use is useful evidence, but it should not be converted into a carbon claim without an appropriate calculation method and data.