Every tech company has a sustainability page now. Carbon neutral by 2030. Powered by renewable energy. Committed to a greener future. The language is everywhere, and honestly, a lot of it is meaningless. But that doesn’t mean technology can’t be part of the solution. It just means we need to be smarter about separating real impact from corporate feel-good marketing.

The Biggest Impact: How Long You Keep Things

The single most impactful thing you can do for tech sustainability is keep your devices longer. Manufacturing accounts for roughly 80% of a smartphone’s lifetime carbon emissions. The mining, processing, assembly, and shipping that happens before you even open the box is where the real environmental cost lies.

Upgrading your phone every year is one of the most environmentally destructive habits in consumer technology. Going from a two-year upgrade cycle to a four-year cycle roughly halves the manufacturing emissions associated with your phone use.

This applies to laptops, tablets, and other electronics too. A well-maintained laptop can easily last five to seven years. The performance difference between a 2022 and 2026 machine for typical office work is negligible. Unless you have a genuine performance need, keeping your current device is almost always the greener choice.

Right to Repair Matters

Companies that make devices difficult to repair are effectively forcing premature replacement. When a battery replacement costs almost as much as a new device, or when a cracked screen requires sending the device to a certified repair centre three states away, the incentive is to buy new.

The right to repair movement has made real progress. The EU now requires manufacturers to make spare parts available for smartphones for at least seven years. Australia has been slower on legislation, but the direction is clear.

When buying new devices, consider repairability. Framework laptops, for instance, are designed to be user-upgradeable and repairable. Fairphone takes a similar approach with smartphones. These aren’t just niche products anymore; they’re genuinely competitive.

Cloud Computing’s Complicated Footprint

Moving to the cloud is often framed as a sustainability win, and there’s some truth to that. Large data centres operated by AWS, Google, and Microsoft are generally more energy-efficient per computation than on-premises servers. They run at higher utilisation rates and invest in cooling efficiency.

But the total energy consumption of cloud computing is growing rapidly. More efficient per unit of compute doesn’t help much when the total units of compute are exploding. The rise of AI workloads, particularly training large models, has pushed data centre energy consumption to levels that are genuinely concerning.

Microsoft’s own sustainability report showed its carbon emissions rose by 30% between 2020 and 2024, largely driven by data centre construction for AI services. Google reported similar trends. The companies making the biggest sustainability promises are also the ones building the most energy-hungry infrastructure.

Software Efficiency Is Underrated

We don’t talk enough about software efficiency as a sustainability issue. A bloated web page that loads 15MB of JavaScript uses more energy to serve and render than a lean page doing the same thing in 200KB. Multiply that by millions of page views and the difference is meaningful.

Efficient software runs on less powerful hardware, which means devices stay useful for longer. It uses less network bandwidth, which reduces energy consumption across the entire delivery chain. And it requires less server capacity, which means fewer data centres.

The trend in software has been moving the wrong direction. Electron apps that wrap a web browser to deliver a desktop experience. Web pages with dozens of tracking scripts. Mobile apps that consume gigabytes of storage. All of this represents wasted energy at scale.

What Companies Can Actually Do

If you run a business and want to make a genuine difference:

Extend device lifecycles. Set a policy of four to five years for laptops rather than three. Refurbish rather than replace when possible.

Audit your cloud usage. Right-size your instances. Shut down development environments when they’re not in use. Choose regions powered by renewable energy when latency permits.

Optimise your software. Performance work isn’t just about user experience; it’s about resource consumption. Faster pages use less energy.

Choose suppliers with real commitments. Look beyond the sustainability page. Check whether they publish actual emissions data, whether their targets are science-based, and whether they’re making progress year over year.

Reduce unnecessary data. Every byte stored somewhere uses energy to maintain. Data retention policies aren’t just about compliance; they’re about not keeping things you don’t need.

The Honest Truth

Individual choices about tech sustainability are dwarfed by industrial and corporate decisions. Your personal carbon footprint from technology is a rounding error compared to what happens at the data centre and manufacturing level.

But that doesn’t mean individual and business choices are pointless. Keeping devices longer, choosing repairable products, and demanding transparency from vendors all contribute to shifting the market. When enough people make different choices, companies respond.

Just don’t mistake a green logo for genuine commitment. The companies doing real work on sustainability are usually the ones publishing detailed, verifiable data rather than vague promises.