10 questions to ask suppliers for more sustainable tech

We read the ESG reports so you don't have to

1) What are the targets and timescales for carbon reduction, waste reduction and water use?

Ambition of targets matters, particularly given the increasing urgency of carbon and other GHG reductions and these are more variable than you might think. For example, Amazon's timescale for reaching net zero carbon emissions across its whole operation is 2040. Microsoft has stated that it will be carbon negative by 2030.

Datacentres and some factories are highly water intensive depending on cooling technology and location. Many datacentres are built in areas like Arizona because of the availability of wind and solar power, but these are regions of high water stress. Vendors should be trying to reduce their water impact with the aim of water positivity by a certain date.

Companies should also be aiming for as close to zero waste to landfill as possible, with the target being to recycle and reuse not just material like paper and plastic but also servers, components and other electronic waste.

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10 questions to ask suppliers for more sustainable tech

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2) Have they signed up to The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi)? And/or CDP?

Signing up to SBTi and publishing a target provides an indication that a company is following a clearly defined - and public - path to reduce emissions.

Choosing to disclose carbon emissions to the Climate Disclosure Project (CDP) is voluntary and provides a strong indication of whether standards and policies are in place as a genuine marker of intent. CDP data constitutes a large global dataset and can be used by researchers and analysts to track progress towards net zero and other environmental objectives such as plastic reduction and water conservation.

Both are useful indicators of how serious a company is about hitting their stated sustainability targets.

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10 questions to ask suppliers for more sustainable tech

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3) What is the sum of scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions?

Emissions calculation is complex, and those presenting emissions data can use that complexity to tell the part of the story that makes it look as though emissions are lower than they truly are.

However, asking for the sum total of all emissions leaves limited room for presentational sleight of hand. There is still some room though, so here are a few things to watch out for.

Firstly, check whether emissions are location-based method (LBM) or market-based method (MBM.) The difference is what a company actually puts into the air versus what they report once carbon credits have been applied. Ideally, both figures will be reported with the carbon accounting method being transparent. This provides visibility of the carbon accounting process and provides a limited insight into the quality of carbon credits - of which more later.

Scope 3 emissions are likely to constitute 70 - 80% of the overall total. If they don't some data is missing.

Not all potential vendors and partners will be fully reporting scope 3 emissions - in fact virtually none will - because most scope 3 emissions (and there 15 categories in total) are incurred upstream in the supply chain and are therefore very difficult to quantify. However, this is a chain effort. If an end user company encourages their suppliers to quantify scope 3 emissions they will be looking at their own supply chain - and on it goes. One company's direct emissions are their customers indirect emissions.

What a vendor has more control over is downstream emissions. These are the emissions produced through the use of their product or service by customers so this is something that can be influenced by design, reporting tools etc.

It is also recommended that those asking for emissions data request the equivalent data from previous years because only then can you get an idea of longer-term trends. Are emissions trending down or are they just being offset more?

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4) Is any data on embodied emissions available?

A sizable majority of the overall carbon footprint of any building is incurred at the beginning of the building lifecycle. Embodied carbon includes emissions created by extraction, manufacturing and transport of materials, and those created during the actual process of building. Embodied carbon also includes maintenance and repairs, decommissioning and disposal including transportation to waste processing and disposal.

Embodied emissions (along with other indirect emissions) are included within the 15 categories of scope 3 emissions, and constitute by far the largest proportion of overall emissions - even of energy intensive buildings like factories and datacentres.

The understanding that tech business have of their own embodied emissions is generally low. Having said that, sustainable building standards such as LEED and BREEAM can be helpful indicators that a business has considered built emissions and taken measures to reduce them in newer buildings.

Foundational materials such as steel and cement account for seven and eight per cent of global carbon emissions respectively but the foundational industries are known as the "hard-to-abate" sector with good reason. Even lower carbon steel, cement, glass etc. Need incredibly high temperatures during manufacture, and that requires fossil fuels.

Tech vendors are beginning to use something called the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3), a free, open-access tool first imagined by Skanska and C Change Labs, and incubated by the Carbon Leadership Forum with over 50 industry partners.

EC3 works by combining building material quantities from construction with a database of digital third-party verified Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). This enables any company starting out on a construction project to make a reasonable estimate of overall embodied carbon emissions, and informs subsequent decisions to be made about lower carbon options.

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5) Is carbon or GHG intensity data available?

Carbon/GHG intensity refers to the amount of carbon or GHGs emissions produced per a defined unit of output. That unit could be a kWh or MWh of electricity - a key metric if you're in the market for any kind of cloud service because it provides a useful measure how much renewable energy is powering their servers.

Some vendors provide carbon intensity by different units - per employee, per square metre of datacentre or per dollar of revenue. This is less helpful as a comparative metric because large organisations will look much less carbon intensive than a larger one even if a greater proportion of the smaller company's electricity consumption is renewable.

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6) How much of their electricity consumption is from carbon free sources?

This is very different to asking how much renewable energy they purchase.

Cloud vendors such as Google will state - entirely legitimately - that they "match 100% of their global electricity use with purchases of renewable energy." This is great, but it does not mean the same thing as being powered by 100% carbon free electricity all the time - which is the ideal. Google's target for that is 2030, and in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, w66% of Google's datacentre electricity consumption as matched with regional, carbon-free sources.

What's the difference?

It comes down to grids, some of which are connected to more renewable sources than others. (This also explains the difference between location and market-based emissions reporting.) Google (and other hyperscalers) use instruments called PPAs to buy energy directly from renewable projects in the regions where their datacenters are located.

The balance is likely to be made up with Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) A REC is created with every MWh of renewable electricity generated but they aren't an ideal way of buying renewable electricity because they don't necessarily generate additional renewable energy (companies often buy then in advance because renewable projects take time to build and begin transmitting to the grid.) because they can be sold more than once.

If vendor is using RECs to stand up a 100% renewable energy claim they should be retiring those RECs or their energy provider who may be buying RECs on their behalf as part of a green tariff should be doing so.

Of course, companies can generate their own renewable energy with solar panels and wind turbines but the amount of energy these installations contribute to factories or datacentres tends to be very small scale - 1% or 2% at most.

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7) Can they provide detail about carbon offsets?

Staying with the Google example, there is a considerable difference between using RECs generated by carbon-free energy to offset other indirect emissions, and the principle of carbon offsetting more broadly, usually referred to as carbon neutrality. The clue is in the wording. Carbon free energy generates no carbon. Carbon neutral can simply mean you've brought REC's (or another type of carbon offset) equivalent to the carbon you have generated but the generation of the electricity you've used has still put carbon into he air.

This is why claims to be "carbon neutral" should always be scrutinised.

There are two overarching types of carbon offset. The first is an avoided emissions offset. This is where emissions that would have been generated had a project not existed, are now avoided. Renewable energy is probably the best example of avoided emissions.

The second type of carbon offset is removal which is usually in the form of reforestation or other tree planting projects, and carbon capture and storage or direct air capture.

Many experts agree that both types of offset have value. Avoidance is arguably the best place to start based on the simple principle that global carbon emissions are too high so not adding to them seems like a sensible first step. However, the carbon emissions that already exist need to be reduced at pace. For that to happen, removal is required.

However, beyond these principles not only do carbon offsets vary in quality, the way that a company uses them also matters. Any vendor using them should be transparent about the offsets they are using.

For instance, reforestation is more useful than protection against deforestation. Lots of companies buy offsets linked to protecting existing rainforest. So, what a company can do is send thousands of tons of carbon into the air, but pay to "offset" those emissions by protecting rainforest which is neutralising those emissions. Whilst nobody will argue that protecting rainforest ecosystems has no value, research has found that in plenty of cases threats to these ecosystems have been overstated, and the calculations of how much carbon they genuinely remove are dubious. Even well-respected carbon offset standards such as Verra are best by this uncertainty.

Ideally, vendors aiming to become carbon neutral, or claiming that they already are, should be doing so primarily on the basis of renewable energy, with carbon offsetting accounting for a decreasing proportion of their carbon accounting year-on-year.

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10 questions to ask suppliers for more sustainable tech

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8) How much water do their offices, datacentres and/or manufacturing facilities withdraw?

We're all well versed in the idea of carbon footprint, but water footprint is also becoming an increasingly important indicator of sustainability. ESG reports typically contain a water metric, be it withdrawal consumption (water consumed is not returned to its source) or preferably both.

An important contributor to water consumption in technology is cooling, be it air conditioning in offices and the cooling of machines in factories and servers in datacentres. Technologies such as air and adiabatic cooling are better than older evaporative systems. Hyperscalers such as Microsoft are pushing ahead with liquid immersion cooling and others such as Deep Green and AWS are supplying surplus heat from datacentres to district heating schemes rather than using water to cool their facilities. The more a company is willing to share details of how it cools its spaces and equipment, the more likely it is to vbe trying to reduce its water consumption.

Offices too are harvesting rainwater and waste water, and vendors are usually only too happy to share details of these schemes. Nonetheless, the metric that matters is litres or gallons consumed, and again it's worth trying to establish the direction the trend is pointing in year-on-year.

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9) What are their waste metrics?

There are lots of useful metrics on waste but perhaps one of the most revealing is landfill diversion rate, which is simply the percentage of overall waste volume that is recycled, reused or repurposed. The higher the percentage the better. Any company boasting a 90% landfill diversion or above is said to be zero waste.

Of course, part of reducing overall tech impact isn't just recycling what you have already used, it's buying a recycled or refurbished item in the first place. Asking the proportion of components or other electronic items which are purchased as refurbished is also important. The performance of refurbished servers can equal - or even better - newer models. A great deal depends on efficiency of configuration.

Metrics concerning bespoke recycling and refurbishment programs as well as details of how businesses are reducing consumption of paper, card and single use plastic are also welcome metrics.

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10 questions to ask suppliers for more sustainable tech

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10) How innovative are they in seeking to reduce their impact?

This innovation could take many, many forms and typically, tech companies aren't slow to share details so it shouldn't be hard to get information. AI has to be the ultimate example. Algorithms can be used to optimise all sorts of processes and platforms to reduce overall impact.

For example, AWS uses algorithmically driven modelling practices such as computational fluid dynamics to optimise the design of cooling systems during the datacentre design phase. This provides an opportunity to optimise energy efficiency at the build stage. A recent example reduced mechanical system energy usage by 20%. That's significant, as is their innovative use of recycled steel in datacentres.

More examples of innovation can be sought in application development. For example, have applications been written to require less compute and less energy? Green coding is a sustainable computing practice which seeks to minimise the energy required to process lines of code. It is usually employed as part of a wider program to reduce the environmental impact of technology. Has it been developed using Agile or Lean? This can reduce CPU and memory utilisation by reducing the amount of rollouts, fixes etc.

There are also lots of questions to ask about platform architecture and utilisation rates. How do SaaS providers ensure that the servers powering their services are at maximum utilisation? What about the hardware? The AWS third generation Arm-based processor AWS Graviton3 uses up to 60% less energy for the same performance as previous generations.

Judging the extent of innovation involved in reducing the impact of technology is subjective, but of all the aspects of sustainable tech buying, it's the most fascinating by far.

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