GreenConcept Project - France
Ecodesign of digital services is an holistic approach which enables the assessment of the environmental impacts with a life cycle analysis methodology including Datacenter, telecom network, and end-user devices.
The GreenConcept project is lead by Occitanie Chamber of Commerce and realized by 3 consultancy companies, all member of Alliance Green IT: Neutreo, Codde Bureau Veritas and GreenIT.fr.
GreenConcept target is to assist 30 Small and Medium enterprises to implement the principle of Ecodesign into the development of their digital services.
On June 2016, 15 companies from several sectors finished their GreenConcept experience: Industry, energy management, agriculture, communication, transport, health...
Many types of project like websites, platform B to B, IOT appliance, webconference, have been analysed with a common life cycle analysis methodology. On each project, results are represented on several scopes: environmental impacts of all the service, for a user during a year and for one functional unit (depending on the project). 4 KPIs have been calculated : Global energy consumption, resource depletion, greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption. To be more explicit, all the KPIs have been translated into common reference (km by car, bottle of water...).
The LCA methodology has been developed by Neutreo, Codde Bureau Veritas and GreenIT.fr, based on the white paper published by Alliance Green IT: http://alliancegreenit.org/wp-content/uploads/Doc%20AGIT/LB-ecoconceptio..., it includes the three main contributors of the digital service meaning the end-users devices, telecom network and Datacenter / cloud services.
Many improvement actions have been identified which would permit to split by two or four the environmental impacts of the digital services analysed.
Occitanie is at the core of digital transition with two major cities and part of the French Tech program: The cites are Montpellier and Toulouse.
Digital economy represents more than 10,000 companies and 50,000 direct job, and several clusters are located in this area.
Occitanie Chamber of Commerce is very concerned with the development of sustainable digital services, which is why GreenConcept project launched in 2017.
GreenConcept project has several goals:
To assist, with experts and 30 companies to implement the principle of Ecodesign into the development of their digital service.
To promote the Ecodesign of digital service with conferences, training and communication plans (video, website, return on experiment from the involved companies...).
To edit a white paper at the end of the project with the best practices identified during the 3 years of the project.
This experimentation shows that there is significant leverage to reduce the digital service and to improve the user experience at the same time.
Considering the Green IT issues at the level of digital service is one of the most important conclusions.
It is also very important to involve all the value chain (from providers to customers) to reduce the environmental impacts.