What Is Digital Sustainability? Beyond Green Computing

Digital sustainability means recognizing and reducing the environmental, social and economic footprint of digital systems.

Every digital action has a footprint. The figures below start in 2009, and that is deliberate: what has changed since is not only how much a single action costs, but how many actions there are.

We often think of online activities as weightless and immaterial: a quick search, a video stream, a query to an AI system. Yet all of them consume energy, rely on physical infrastructures, and produce emissions. Back in 2009, Google reported that a single search generated about 0.2 grams of CO₂. With around one billion searches per day at the time, this meant the yearly footprint of Google searches alone was comparable to driving more than 500 million kilometres by car.

Google has cut emissions per search substantially since then. The footprint grew anyway, because the number of searches did: from about one billion a day in 2009 to estimates of 8 to 16 billion today. This is the pattern that matters, and it recurs everywhere: efficiency per unit improving while the total rises, with neither of the two visible to the person searching.

And search is only part of the story. In 2009, Google was mostly about search. Today it runs a vast ecosystem: YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Photos, Workspace, Cloud and Android, each with billions of users. Around it, thousands of other digital services have multiplied. The digital footprint has expanded not only because we search more, but because we do much more online, streaming, storing, sharing and interacting in ways that simply did not exist at scale fifteen years ago.

This is what we mean by digital sustainability: recognising that the online world is not clean or immaterial, but carries a very real footprint, environmental, social and economic.

Beyond Efficiency

Here lies the central point: digital sustainability is not only about efficiency. Making technology greener is absolutely necessary, but decisively not sufficient.

Most discussions on digital sustainability focus on technical efficiency, greener data centres, carbon neutral cloud services, energy saving devices. These are essential steps, but if considered in isolation they remain partial. True sustainability requires a broader lens: one that looks at how digital systems are designed, governed, and used in everyday life.

When Design Creates Unsustainability

Take video streaming. Server optimisation reduces emissions, yet defaults like autoplay, infinite scroll and ultra high resolution encourage endless consumption. These are not technical necessities; they are design choices that shape behaviour.

Social platforms follow the same logic. Their infrastructure may run on renewable energy, but the core business model is built around maximising engagement. Push notifications, infinite feeds and algorithmic amplification normalise excess and overload. Here, sustainability is not only about energy but also about governance and incentives.

In cloud storage, the issue is data hoarding: vast amounts of unused information are kept just in case, often with redundant backups. What looks like a harmless practice generates invisible waste with a very real environmental cost.

Even e-commerce shows contradictions. Logistics may become more efficient, but one click purchases and instant delivery fuel unsustainable consumption patterns. Efficiency gains cannot offset systemic incentives that constantly drive demand.

And online advertising adds another dimension. Many services we think of as free are powered by attention driven advertising models. This creates incentives for endless data production, hyper personalisation, and engagement at any cost. The environmental cost is significant, but the social cost may be even greater, from the erosion of privacy to the amplification of polarisation. What looks free is in fact sustained by an unsustainable cycle of data extraction and overconsumption.

Why Efficiency Alone Is Not Enough

These examples reveal a crucial truth: green computing is essential, but it cannot by itself fix unsustainable digital practices. Even if powered entirely by renewable energy, autoplay, infinite feeds, data hoarding, instant shopping and attention driven advertising would remain unsustainable by design. Efficiency matters, but when growth and excess are built into the system, efficiency alone cannot make it sustainable.

Digital sustainability, therefore, requires more than technical improvements. It is a systemic challenge: it involves infrastructures, but also the governance, design and everyday practices that shape how digital systems work.

And it starts from a plainer problem than any of these. None of it reaches the person acting. Opening a very light page and a very heavy one is the same gesture, with the same face, and nothing tells you they differ. Digital is not immaterial. It is invisible. What carries no signal cannot be decided upon, and sustainability is above all a decision.

Going beyond green does not mean dismissing efficiency, but embedding it in a larger transformation. Only by combining analysis, communication and action can we build a digital future that is not only efficient, but also balanced, responsible and lasting.

And this transformation cannot remain on paper. It requires tools, spaces and partnerships capable of turning research into shared practice. That is why digital sustainability is also about technology transfer: bringing knowledge, methods and solutions into the territories where companies, institutions and communities can use them to grow sustainably.

Making these effects visible, in both directions, including the cases where the figure turns out far smaller than expected, is the work we describe in our framework and in our manifesto.

Andrea Carignani | Digital Sustainability Hub