In today’s corporate world, ‘sustainability’ is frequently synonymous with the physical: rooftop solar panels, electric delivery vans, or reducing single-use plastics in the breakroom. 

Those are important pieces of a green plan, but a huge percentage of a company’s environmental impact is invisible. 

As we evolve to an increasingly paperless economy, the ‘digital carbon footprint‘ is the next frontier for businesses towards the TBL (Triple Bottom Line). This means companies should measure success not just by financial benefit(Profit), but also by their social (People) and environmental (Planet) performance, which are collectively called the 3Ps. 

What this perspective does is it says that long-term success for businesses comes from holding everyone involved accountable for the environment, reducing their carbon footprint. 

On short, what this means is that these 3 Ps are how the success rate of a business is measured:

long-term success = profit + social and environmental responsibility

So, if you were wondering how you can lean towards the other two Ps, we’ll go over four very simple and easy-to-dodigital swaps that’ll help you transform your company into a greener and leaner profit-making machine.

‘Dark Data’ & the Cloud – Clear Them!

Did you know that every email sent, each file deposited into the cloud, each transaction processed… all these things add to the power consumption of global data centers. Sure, the amount of one single process mightn’t be anything special. But they add up. And they do so quickly! Just think about how many emails are sent every day. 

How many gigabytes of files are stored on the cloud each and every day, including backups, and how many transactions are done each day? Hundreds, thousands? More? 

All of this accounts for approximately. 1%-1.5% of global electricity generation today. 

A small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) can reduce its digital carbon footprint by a significant amount by opting for this strategy. Plus, it’s also the most affordable strategy on this list. Another benefit of this is that you aren’t compromising operational efficiency at all.

Is your business one of those that seem to hoard all kinds of digital data for ‘just in case’ emergencies? You aren’t using the data at all, but you still keep it for some reason. Plus, in most cases, these data points aren’t really useful at all (e.g., blurred images, redundant emails, old project drafts that were scraped and never used, old presentations, old/expired documents, etc.). 

All this data is known as dark data. It’s basically digital accumulated data that’s been processed but never used.

Data centers need gigantic amounts of electricity to keep servers cool and functional around the clock. Using a ‘Clean Sweep’ policy can greatly minimize part of that energy load. 

Suggested Swap: Create auto-delete policies for emails older than five years and encourage your team members to use collaborative links (Google Docs, for instance, and even collaboration links such as those found in Microsoft Teams, as opposed to large file attachments) for your users who make multiple carbon-laden copies of the same report.

Hardware Minimalism

A regular topic of some sustainable businesses calls for keeping products for as long as you can (preferably for their lifetime).

Practically, from an office standpoint, this means avoiding single-use hardware. Firms have kept the ‘one task, one tool’ cycle for decades, one machine for printing, one for scanning, and separate terminals for each desk. 

The Swap: Simplify by investing in quality terminals for groups of 5 or 10 users. You will get a long life, no trouble with gadgets like tablets, phones, printers, and scanners. These are notoriously hard to recycle, and unless you can scan, print, or use it as a register, try to keep to multitasking tools when you don’t rely on new devices.

You help minimize the need for ‘e-waste’ and the carbon-intensive process of making new electronics that have become obsolete as you build on what you own to create multiple business uses. Do your research and invest smartly.

The ‘Paperless’ Checkout Revolution

In retail and service, thermal paper receipts are obviously one of the major sources of waste and are also among the most visible. 

These receipts are not easy to recycle as they have a chemical coating that is common in many of these payments, as well as the energy-consuming physical machines needed to print them (with legacy hardware and similar issues). 

Swap It: Embracing digital-first finance is at the core of a sustainable business model. Doing away with the unwieldy, hardware-intensive register systems, businesses can reduce their physical footprint. A system like secure credit card processing with Adaptiv enables even the smallest boutique or service provider to be paperless at the very moment. 

This, underpinned by systems such as the one offered by Adaptiv, secures customer data with the most modern encryption and eliminates the time and costs of shipping and keeping extra plastic hardware installed. 

When it comes to a cloud-native payment gateway, your transactions in everyday life are as green as secure and save you the carbon cost of ‘hardware bloat’ at the point of sale.

Green Virtual Meetings

Even if video conferencing does much better for the planet in a given meeting than flying to a meeting, it is still not ‘zero impact’. High definition video streaming takes a lot of bandwidth, requiring additional energy from network infrastructure. 

The Swap: Add ‘Audio-Only’ Fridays or require employees to turn off their cameras during internal meetings without visual cues as long as possible. 

Studies show that turning off your camera on a virtual call can cut the carbon footprint for that meeting by as much as 96% (Wow!). 

Conclusion

Most often, behavioral changes are the most meaningful things. Conducting an audit of your digital habits, the way you store data, how you team up with colleagues, and how you manage your financial infrastructure can all help to make a more resilient and environmentally-friendly business. 

It’s not about getting rid of technology, but using technology with (responsible) intention.