Sustainable Computing: How Green Technologies are Reducing Carbon Footprints
What is Green Computing?
Green computing, also known as green IT, refers to the environmentally friendly design, manufacture, usage, and disposal of computers and related systems. Practitioners aim to reduce energy consumption, minimize electronic waste, and encourage using renewable resources throughout the technology lifecycle.
From something as simple as powering off your computer when not in use to corporate-level steps like investing in nuclear energy for data centers, every conscious step towards reducing software's carbon footprint is part of green IT.
History and Background
Green computing first came to prominence in 1992 when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched the Energy Star label. The idea behind this development was to identify energy-efficient consumer electronics.
As a result, tech companies have been expected to look beyond high performance and consider sustainability when developing computers and other devices. For example, Intel scrapped development work on two Pentium 5 chips in 2004 due to their high energy consumption. The company instead shifted its focus to energy-efficient chip architectures, ushering in the era of multi-core processors.
Similarly, 26 tech CEOs came together to found the European Green Digital Coalition (EGDC) in 2021. With 82 active companies across Europe, the group invests in green digital solutions and develops methods for measuring the environmental impact of green computing.
The Green Computing Revolution in 2025
Green computing is rapidly evolving from a nice-to-have initiative to an essential component of corporate decarbonization strategy. As we move through 2025, several key developments are shaping the landscape:
- Integrated Decarbonization: Green and sustainable computing has become integral to achieving national and organizational climate objectives, with enterprises incorporating energy-efficient equipment as part of broader commitments.
- Real-World Implementation: Major companies are leading by example—Google aims to reduce 50% of its Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions by 2030 and powers some offices and data centers with carbon-free energy, while Unilever has committed $150 million to decarbonize its manufacturing through more efficient equipment.
- Data Center Transformation: Green data centers with lower electricity consumption and edge computing models are becoming increasingly prevalent as organizations priorities environmental impact alongside performance.
Benefits of Green Software
Adopting green computing practices offers numerous advantages for corporations:
- Environmental Impact: Lower energy consumption and reduced e-waste contribute to a smaller carbon footprint by decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.
- Cost Savings: Sustainable computing reduces electricity bills and operational costs. Research suggests efficient code can cut energy bills by 17-90%.
- Regulatory Compliance: Aligning with environmental regulations can prevent legal issues and penalties. As Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) regulations become more stringent, organizations are pressured to implement and prove sustainable tech practices.
- Enhanced Brand Image: Demonstrating a commitment to sustainability improves public perception and customer loyalty.
Challenges to Green IT
Several obstacles hinder the widespread adoption of green computing, including:
- Lack of Awareness: Many users and organizations remain unaware of the environmental impact of their tech usage and the steps they can take to mitigate it. The market still emphasizes speed and performance over sustainable practices.
- High Initial Costs: Energy-efficient technology requires significant up-front capital investment, which can deter cash-strapped organizations from prioritizing it.
- Rapid Technological Advancements: The fast pace of tech development can make keeping up with sustainable practices challenging. For instance, each new iteration of a large language model (LLM) like Chat GPT will require developers to ensure compliance with eco-friendly standards.
- Different User Types and Needs: Creating a standard, one-size-fits-all green computing framework is challenging when user profiles and needs vary significantly across the IT industry. A software developer’s power consumption differs vastly from that of a data center, so the same energy efficiency audit can’t be applied to both.
How does green computing work?
There are four main methods to implement the use of green computing, with each method of green computing remaining dynamic in order to be as effective as possible.
Green Use
This method of green computing seeks to reduce the amount of electricity consumed by computers and their sister devices in order to ensure they are used in an environmentally friendly way. For instance, a computer with a long-lasting battery won’t need to be charged as often – meaning the computer won’t require extensive amounts of electricity and ultimately become a more energy efficient, sustainable device.
Green Disposal
While it is important to manufacture devices to comply with green computing standards, it is also important that they can be disposed of safely – not only to prevent excessive waste, but in order to protect the environment from toxic substances such as ozone depleting substances. Green disposal can be done by either reworking the use of existing green computing equipment or by properly disposing of obsolete pieces of technology.
Green Design
Design isn’t just for looks – but it can also help to improve the energy efficiency of a piece of technology, especially in green computing. Design teams should seek to rectify the design of green computing devices such as printers, projectors, or servers to ensure minimal energy consumption.
Green Manufacturing
Last but not least, green manufacturing is an imperative component of green computing – as ultimately, many of the emissions created by any company are produced as a result of mass production. Therefore, it is essential that companies handling the production of green computing technologies seek ways to reduce their emissions whilst manufacturing their products.
In addition to these four tactics of green computing, governments are also becoming increasingly aware of the importance and benefits of green computing – as many authorities will seek to regulate and promote the use of green computing over traditional IT systems.
Understanding the carbon footprint of software
So how exactly can software-a non-tangible, digital application or program comprising lines of code and little else-emit carbon? Let’s answer this question by first refreshing our minds on the definition of a carbon footprint.
Defining a carbon footprint in the context of software
National Geographic defines a carbon footprint as “the sum total of all the greenhouse gas emissions that had to take place in order for a product to be produced or for an activity to take place.”
With this quote in mind, we may begin to see how it could apply to software—in particular, software development. After all, as one of Google’s developers so succinctly puts it: “running any kind of computer workload requires energy in the form of electricity. And this energy often comes from sources that release CO2.”
3 ways in which software generates
Fair enough, you may be thinking, this all makes logical sense so far. And yet, if it’s the hardware consuming energy to run the software, not vice versa, then why do we claim that software is a problem in this carbon equation?
Let’s look at the 3 main software factors contributing to your carbon footprint.
1. Coding and development
From the very start of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), the decisions your engineers make and the quality of code they write will significantly impact the carbon-intensity of the final software.
Choosing a coding language, for instance, can have a massive effect on just how much energy is consumed during the coding process and later, when other devices run the finished application. Studies have shown, for example, that coding with Python can consume around 45-75 times as much energy as a much more energy-efficient language like C, C++, or Java.
AI development and training-an increasingly intrinsic part of the IT industry-is another highly carbon-intensive aspect of software development. For example, to train just one neural network model today pumps into our atmosphere as much carbon, or CO2, as five cars would in their lifetimes.
2. Maintenance
Further down the SDLC, the maintenance of your software also becomes a carbon problem. When code is written inefficiently in the beginning—or legacy systems are still in use long after they should have been upgraded or replaced—something called ‘technical debt’ quickly builds up.
Technical debt takes the form of high labor costs and lower employee satisfaction, to name but two factors, and can demand up to 40% of your entire IT budget just paying engineers to spend their time digging through spaghetti code and inefficient phrasing to fix bugs, change or scale programs, and maintain an application’s up-time.
3. Deployment
Lastly, we discovered that inefficiencies introduced during design and maintenance phases increase your software’s carbon footprint when deployed.
When code is written inefficiently-using energy-intensive language, unnecessarily heavy loops, large conditional statements or floating-point operations, or employing excessive memory accesses-it demands a whole lot more energy to run on an end-user’s device, compared to code written with sustainability and efficiency as core drivers.
Green software engineering practices
Now that we’ve discussed the role software engineering plays in producing carbon emissions-and why it’s important to care about this-let’s outline some of the practices you can employ to reduce your carbon footprint through green software engineering.1. Develop a green coding framework to test and plan ahead
As Abhijit Sunil, Senior Analyst at Forrester said, “measuring the impact of your efforts is important. because if you can measure it, you can improve it”. There are many green IT tools and frameworks you can employ to help you measure and reduce the carbon footprint of your software. To make it easier for you to navigate, we’ve made a list.
Tools to measure the carbon footprint of software
- Joular JX—A Java-based tool to help you monitor power consumption at the source-code level.
- PowerAPI/PowerMeter—Allows you to measure power consumption at different levels of granularity: i.e., global, virtual machine, container, application, processes, code.
- Scaphandre-A monitoring agent for power consumption at Process, Application, and Server levels, with dedicated energy consumption metrics.
- Kepler and SusScanner-Tools for measuring and optimizing the energy consumption of different cloud applications/your Cloud formation templates.
- Cloud Carbon Footprint and Bovista-Open data sources for energy usage in software and IT, and related carbon emissions.
Conclusion
Inefficiencies in coding and system architecture are responsible for a percentage of the ICT industry’s carbon footprint, because the quality of your software directly impacts the amount of energy it requires to be developed, maintained, and deployed.
Creating highly maintainable code leads to a reduction in maintenance effort. Second, it is easier to integrate green coding patterns into an existing system with a well-structured code base and software architecture.
As such, software engineers are set to play a critical role in reducing your organization’s carbon footprint through the adoption of energy-efficient development practices.
With the need for, and applications of, software increasing year-on-year—as our society continues to delve deeper into the Digital Age—organizations must now prioritize sustainable software engineering, whilst developers and IT leaders should focus on adopting green IT and advocating for even more sustainable development solutions in future.
