The Roadmap to Sustainable Digital Infrastructure by 2030

Impact Principle

Improve transparency and accountability of greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption in every stage of the digital value chain to enable better data for environmental impact assessments.

Target

Assessing a Digital Carbon Footprint is adopted as industry standard across the entire digital value chain for consistent monitoring and reporting.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Contributing SDIA Members:

Impact Principle

Decarbonize the energy consumed in sourcing of materials, production and operation of hardware (excl. end-consumer devices).

Target

The majority of data centers are consuming at least 50% renewable energy and use hardware with respective supply chain criteria.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Contributing SDIA Members:

Impact Principle

Improve the energy efficiency of IT Hardware

Target

Industry average Utilization rates average 60%

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Contributing SDIA Members:

Impact Principle

Reduce the amount of energy required to complete IT workloads by simplifying their design, and improving the wider digital architecture

Target

It becomes industry standard to update, improve and remove software that is too code and compute intensive

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Contributing SDIA Members:

Impact Principle

Cooling Systems consume less energy it self and are designed to make excess heat available to offtakers.

Target

Cooling systems are designed to consume only 10% of the maximum utilized IT load and deliver 60% of their electrical input as excess heat to offtakers in non-tropical hemispheres.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Contributing SDIA Members:

Impact Principle

Reduce the amount of energy required to build, operate and decommission a data center

Target

90% of new build data centers are classed as nearly zero energy buildings

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Contributing SDIA Members:

Impact Principle

Improve the recyclability and interoperability of IT hardware

Target

90% of IT hardware are designed and built to a new industry developed standard

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Contributing SDIA Members:

Impact Principle

Improve the uptake of recycled and refurbished hardware

Target

90% of industry hardware is resold on certified second hand hardware markets

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Impact Principle

Extending the design life of IT hardware

Target

It becomes industry standard for servers to be able to function with minor performance drops in its first 5 years of life.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Contributing SDIA Members:

Impact Principle

Improve recycling rates in hardware and their component parts

Target

90% of new build hardware components are recyclable.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Impact Principle

Reduce Resource consumption, pollutants and emissions by designing hardware and facilities with the full life cycle in mind.

Target

Creating and monitoring a circular design strategy is a standard for every producing, planning or energy intensive institution in the value chain.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Contributing SDIA Members:

Impact Principle

Improve transparency and accountability of resource consumption in every stage of the digital value chain to enable better data for environmental impact assessments.

Target

Assessing a Digital Resource Footprint is adopted as industry standard across the entire digital value chain for consistent monitoring and reporting.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Contributing SDIA Members:

Impact Principle

Reduce the amount of fresh water consumption in the digital value chain

Target

90% of data center water consumption comes out as clean as it came in

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Contributing SDIA Members:

Impact Principle

Reduce the amount of rare earth metal consumption across the digital value chain

Target

90% of rare material consumption has been removed compared to consumption levels of 2021

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Impact Principle

Reduce the amount of pollutants produced on the operation of a data center

Target

90% of data center operational pollutants (typically from backup power and cooling systems) are removed from data center facilities, compared to 2021 levels

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Impact Principle

Improve transparency and accountability of pollutant emissions in every stage of the digital value chain to enable better data for environmental impact assessments.

Target

Assessing a Digital pollutant Footprint is adopted as industry standard across the entire digital value chain for consistent monitoring and reporting.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Contributing SDIA Members:

Impact Principle

Reduce the amount of pollutants produced during the manufacturing of IT hardware and construction materials

Target

90% of pollutants have been removed from the manufacturing process, compared to 2021 levels

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Impact Principle

Be able to define efficiency and performance by standardizing a definition of Digital Power

Target

Digital power can be quantified and defined, and later benchmarked and improved

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Impact Principle

Improve utilization rates and reduce the cost of compute by increase competition and prevent natural monopolies forming

Target

IT becomes unbundled (separation of infrastructure and services), facilitating independent compute and service providers, through vendor neutral marketplaces

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):

Impact Principle

Improving the efficiency and reliability of tomorrow's digital architecture

Target

Rural digitization connects more than 90% of Europe's population with redundant, cheap digital power

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG):