How your organisation’s equipment policy can impact the environment

At the Endless OS Foundation, we’ve recently been updating some of our internal policies. One of these is our equipment policy, covering things like what laptops and peripherals are provided to employees. While updating it, we took the opportunity to think about the environmental impact it would have, and how we could reduce that impact compared to standard or template equipment policies.

How this matters

For many software organisations, the environmental impact of hardware purchasing for employees is probably at most the third-biggest contributor to the organisation’s overall impact, behind carbon emissions from energy usage (in building and providing software to a large number of users), and emissions from transport (both in sending employees to conferences, and in people’s daily commute to and from work). These both likely contribute tens of tonnes of emissions per year for a small/medium sized organisation (as a very rough approximation, since all organisations are different). The lifecycle emissions from a modern laptop are in the region of 300kgCO2e, and one target for per-person emissions is around 2.2tCO2e/year by 2030.

If changes to this policy reduce new equipment purchase by 20%, that’s a 20kgCO2e/year reduction per employee.

So, while changes to your organisation’s equipment policy are not going to have a big impact, they will have some impact, and are easy and unilateral changes to make right now. 20kgCO2e is roughly the emissions from a 150km journey in a petrol car.

What did we put in the policy?

We started with a fairly generic policy. From that, we:

  • Removed time-based equipment replacement schedules (for example, replacing laptops every 3 years) and went with a more qualitative approach of replacing equipment when it’s no longer functional enough for someone to do their job properly on.
  • Provided recommended laptop models for different roles (currently several different versions of the Dell XPS 13), which we have checked conform to the rest of the policy and have an acceptable environmental impact — Dell are particularly good here because, unlike a lot of laptop manufacturers, they publish a lifecycle analysis for their laptops
  • But also gave people the option to justify a different laptop model, as long as it meets certain requirements:

All laptops must meet the following standards in order to have low lifetime impacts:

All other equipment must meet relevant environmental standards, which should be discussed on a case by case basis

If choosing a device not explicitly listed above, manufacturers who provide Environmental Product Declarations for their products should be preferred

  • These requirements aim to minimise the laptop’s carbon emissions during use (i.e. its power consumption), and increase the chance that it will be repairable or upgradeable when needed. In particular, having a replaceable battery is important, as the battery is the most likely part of the laptop to wear out.
  • The policy prioritises laptop upgrades and repairs over replacement, even when the laptop would typically be coming up for replacement after 3 years. The policy steers people towards upgrading it (a new hard drive, additional memory, new battery, etc.) rather than replacing it.
  • When a laptop is functional but no longer useful, the policy requires that it’s wiped, refurbished (if needed) and passed on to a local digital inclusion charity, school, club or similar.
  • If a laptop is broken beyond repair, the policy requires that it’s disposed of according to WEEE guidelines (which is the norm in Europe, but potentially not in other countries).

A lot of this just codifies what we were doing as an organisation already — but it’s good to have the policy match the practice.

Your turn

I’d be interested to know whether others have similar equipment policies, or have better or different ideas — or if you make changes to your equipment policy as a result of reading this.