IT Footprint calculation
A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is crucial to assess the overall environmental impact of digital services or infrastructures.
In particular, it allows:
• Overall assessment: A LCA provides a holistic assessment of the entire life cycle of a service (physical or not), from the design phase to the end of its use.
• Identification of points of interest: It helps to identify the phases of the website life cycle that have the greatest environmental impact, whether in the development, distribution, user use or end-of-life phase.
• Objective data: An LCA is based on objective and scientific data, thus avoiding assumptions and assumptions in environmental impact assessment.
• Optimization: By identifying sources of environmental impact, a LCA allows designers to optimize the most critical aspects, such as reducing energy consumption, reducing carbon emissions and minimizing electronic waste.
• Technology choices: Helps make informed decisions about the technologies to be used, web hosts, development practices, and type of hardware or infrastructure choices that reduce the carbon footprint (but also on all impact indicators).
• Sustainable design: A LCA promotes sustainable design by encouraging the reduction of unnecessary functionality, the optimization of images and files, and the implementation of good programming practices.
• Awareness: It raises awareness among web professionals and end users about the environmental impact of their actions, encouraging more responsible behaviour.
• Monitoring and continuous improvement: An LCA allows you to monitor progress in reducing the environmental impact of digital technology, and promotes continuous improvement by identifying optimization opportunities (before/after comparison).
In short, LCA plays a key role in web eco-design by providing a solid foundation to assess, optimize and minimize the environmental footprint of digital services and materials, thus contributing to a more sustainable and responsible use.
What method?
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a systematic method of assessing the environmental impacts associated with all stages of the life of a product or service. For digital LCA in business, the steps are as follows:
1. Definition of objectives
This step is to clearly define what you want to assess and why (by business unit), as well as the scope of the analysis. It focuses on the main issues of the study.
2. Data inventory
This involves collecting all the data necessary to assess the environmental impact of the study object. This includes information on energy consumption, emissions, manufacturing, use and end-of-life.
3. Impact Assessment
This step consists of analyzing and evaluating the potential effects of the collected data on the environment. Impacts can be related to energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, resource use: The 16 environmental impact criteria of the LCA.
4. Interpretation of results
Once the impacts have been assessed, this step makes it possible to interpret the results, draw conclusions and recommend actions to improve environmental performance.
It is important to note that the LCA is an assessment tool, not a certification. Results may vary depending on the methodologies and data used. For a digital LCA in business, it is essential to consider all aspects, from the manufacture of equipment to their end of life, through their use and maintenance. LCA is particularly effective in a logic of improvement with the implementation of comparison before/ after systematic (In particular via the Green IT Impact tool developed by GreenWEB).