Spotlight: Low Carbon Platforms
Everything that goes into delivering websites and apps at scale can come together to produce a vast amount of equivalent carbon emissions, which is why our design and build agency, MMT, are taking steps to embed sustainable development practices into the heart of their service delivery. MMT’s Principal Engineer, Owen Ayres, tells us more…
Since launching way back in 1999, we at MMT have always been proud of our role as a pioneering digital change maker. Today, we’re a 200+ strong tech company and a digital partner to enterprises like Boots, Vodafone and Elanco. Working collaboratively with our clients, we build platforms and partnerships that empower businesses to become digitally better.
That growth has given us more exposure to the environmental impact of digital in recent years, as research reveals the internet emits more emissions than the airline industry.
And leveraging emerging tools to measure the estimated environmental impact (such as website carbon calculators) with our biggest client's websites highlights the sheer scale this impact can be in digital. For example, when conducting an audit of a legacy site for a new client, we found it to have emissions exceeding that of MSQ’s entire group emissions for the whole of last year!
Understanding these issues has led us to introduce sustainability as a service delivery principle, meaning we consider the environmental impact of everything we do when working with our clients or on any internal initiative, from the core outputs (such as a website) to the processes we use to deliver it. And we believe every business embarking on a project of similar ilk should be considering the same.
The thirst for technology – and what it all means for the planet
There is a theme of ‘excess’ digital consumption on the rise, and it is present in both business and personal consumption. High-speed internet is resulting in higher expectations of media online, with instant loading 4k video, high quality images and large rapid websites all taken for granted in some parts of the world.
In a digital delivery sense, new environments to host your test sites are now expected in minutes, companies spin up thousands of resources on the cloud in the click of a button and pipelines run deployments hundreds of times a month to satisfy the need for frequent changes.
Whilst a lot of these technological changes bring benefits, it’s also leading to an estimated increase in demand of between 5-7% each year on the equivalent emissions emitted by the internet. People expect more and businesses must improve their efficiency and offering to remain competitive.
This isn’t a great trend for the planet. But we can help mitigate this collectively by ensuring our digital practices are sustainable. That might mean deploying our code at certain times of the day (when renewable energy is powering more of the grid) or avoiding the automatic use of media-heavy content where it isn’t necessary. These tactics can be embedded in a way that has next to zero impact on our outcomes or day-to-day digital delivery whilst helping to reduce that 5-7% annual rise.
The key to sustainable delivery
Taking sustainable platforms seriously means developing consistent guidelines for building sustainable websites and implementing sustainable digital delivery that broadly covers a number of areas:
Front-end experiences
Back-end systems
Digital infrastructure and architecture
UX and design
Development operations
At MMT, we're also leveraging data like carbon intensity (sometimes referred to as grid emissions factor or emission intensity), which is a measure of how clean our electricity is. We can use it to understand when the use of fossil fuels is high in a specific area and adapt based on this, which might mean deferring the run of a deployment, serving a more lightweight version of a website or even encouraging people to unplug their laptops.
We consider the offline factors of sustainability too, such as minimising the need for printed documentation (promoting digital first alternatives where appropriate) or negating the need for commuting when virtual meetings can suffice. MMT shifted to remote-first during the pandemic and that has stayed with us for most roles since, helping reduce our overall environmental impact.
Even if some of the sustainable wins are small, we’re finding it an easy win-win for our clients because sustainable practices in digital naturally overlaps with IT cost saving and improved customer experiences. It’s also a great stepping-stone to bigger changes within a client’s businesses, creating a platform to championing environmentally conscious decision making throughout a whole organisation.
The future of sustainable digital delivery
As we look ahead, we’re hoping to do everything we can to maximise awareness of digital sustainability across our industry to help encourage a collective effort to reduce the environmental impact of the internet.
To help achieve this, we’re currently working closely with the BIMA Sustainability Council co-chair and MSQ’s Chief Sustainability Officer, James Cannings, alongside other industry experts to introduce the first set of open web sustainability guidelines. The ambition here is to take some of the sustainable practices mentioned above into a matured set of structured standards for others to work with across the web, encouraging more widespread adoption of sustainable digital practices.
We’ve also recently adapted our latest thinking and best practices into a sustainability assessment, which requires us accessing some key systems, documentation and people to understand the environmental impact of an existing digital estate. We then build a report to help clients understand how they can reduce the environmental impact of their digital department, including its processes and outputs.
Because building low carbon platforms is no longer a nice added benefit to make a client feel better. It needs to be an imperative part of an organisation’s digital delivery plans.
“The next 5 years should see some exciting developments and opportunities for those willing to face up to the realities of the climate crisis. Those attempting business as usual will soon be on the sharp end of economic shocks, consumer rejection and overall decline.”
— Will Railton, Senior Strategist, MSQ/Sustain