From carbon calories to renewable energy: eight ways to make technology products more sustainable

One of the biggest challenges facing technology manufacturers with a conscience is that they’re part of the problem. No matter how big a percentage of recycled plastics you use in your new product, it’s still chomping through the world’s resources. How do you square this circle?

To find out, I turned to Logitech, one of the most ecologically minded technology manufacturers. Its work in the area dates back to the 2003, when a young Robert O’Mahony joined the company, and he’s turned a one-man mission into a 40-strong team over the course of two decades.

Robert is now the company’s Head of Sustainability. When we met during a visit to Logitech’s Cork office, I set him a challenge: come up with a personal wish list in his quest to make technology more sustainable.

So, here are eight ideas that promise to do precisely that (click on a link to jump to a section).

• Carbon calories
• Share knowledge
• Global circularity
• Carbon literacy
• 100% renewable energy
• Carbon transparency
• Use generative AI
• Confidential carbon index

Carbon calories: easily understood industry standards to measure impact of each new product

If you look on the side of a Logitech box you’ll likely find a logo stating that it’s carbon neutral or not. But this is just the start, with the company starting to a precise number to show the total weight of CO2e associated with the product during its life, from production to packaging to usage. While that’s a noble move, it doesn’t help a consumer when judging one product against another – unless the second product is also made by Logitech.

“I think what’s necessary in order for companies to make progress is to be held to account against the same standard,” Robert says. “But the standard needs to make sense.”

To see how things can go wrong, he points to white goods. When its standardisation began – the rating of A, B, C, D etc for the energy efficiency – its ratings made sense, but as time has moved on “it’s now an A Plus, A Plus Plus, A Plus Plus. I’m standing there as a consumer and saying, how many pluses do I need after my A in order to do the right thing?”

He cites calories as a good example of a universal measure that’s easily understood by consumers. “If it’s a food, it has a calorie count, you can figure it out for yourself. That doesn’t really exist when it comes to climate action or climate impact. So a standard is important, but the relevance of that standard to the consumer is equally important.”

That’s why he wants the industry to create the equivalent of carbon calories for the technology sector. “What I really want to be able to do is say, what’s the product carbon footprint of this? How does it compare to another product on a like-for-like basis basis? And that requires standardisation and harmonisation.”

Share knowledge and stop thinking of carbon impact as a competitive advantage

Robert kicks off his second argument with a simple statement. “Sustainable design is a competitive advantage for certain brands, but it shouldn’t be.” This might raise an eyebrow to rivals, as Logitech makes a big thing about the carbon neutrality of its products both on its website and on the boxes – including the percentage of recycled plastics used within each one.

To Robert, however, driving home a competitive advantage “is not our intention”. Instead, he wants Logitech to be the brand that motivates others to do the right thing by showing them the right way. To be, as he calls it, a “lighthouse brand”.

“I’d love to see more and more brands get on board [to] create an alliance of the willing, where they said ‘we know things about designing a better version of a product or a better version of a component or material, and we’re actually helping others to do that because that’s the right thing’.”

As he succinctly puts it, “brand A doesn’t get its own planet”.

To see how this could work, Robert points to the Responsible Business Alliance (RBA). Started in 2004 with a handful of companies – think Dell, HP, IBM, Intel – it has now grown to an alliance of 500, including Logitech which joined in 2007.

“[The RBA founders] got together and said there’s no regulation here and we’re concerned,” he says. “So let’s pool our resources. Let’s pool our knowledge. Let’s get all our smart people together, sitting in a room, thinking about developing tools, knowledge and capabilities.”

While acknowledging that no such alliance is ever perfect, Robert has seen the RBA’s impact grow over time. “I’d love to see a sustainable innovation version of that,” he concludes.

Circularity on a global scale

Sticking to the theme of companies working together, Robert wants companies to stop approaching circularity within their own siloes and work as one global entity.

“There’s a lot of well-intentioned organisations out there talking about circularity, and really doing their best to help companies on circularity, but again, I think it’s a very siloed approach,” he explains.

“Maybe I’m being simplistic here, but for me Logitech makes a bunch of things with a bunch of material. And if we can share with others within our sector, and outside of our sector, the material we need and the things we make, then maybe there will be synergies that exist.”

Perhaps, he argues, there’s a material desperately needed by members of the technology industry that already exists in the automotive or agricultural industry but is considered waste. Rather than throw it away, sell it to a different industry.

“I would love a day where I switch my laptop on and I go into my catalogue and that catalogue is showing me all of the next-life or the recycled materials that are available to me. And then I go to my engineers and designers and say, there’s your ingredients list. And it goes from this sector to this sector, and it goes from waste to raw material.”

This might sound like a pipe dream, but Robert reminds me that when pointing to a keyboard earlier he said that the recycled plastics it used might have come from a printer. “I didn’t say it might have been a park bench, or might have been a folding table on the on an aircraft. I’m not playing outside of my sector, right? Because we tend not to. So I think it’s cross-sector engagement.”

Carbon literacy for all companies

When talking about carbon calories earlier, Robert was essentially trying to instantly educate all consumers about carbon production. For his fourth wish, he applies a similar idea to executive boards.

“I would love to see a broad adoption of carbon literacy, beyond the experts,” he says. “I would love to see carbon literacy across the organisation.”

This particularly applies to those decision makers who currently base business decisions on financial profit and loss. “I would love to be able to elevate carbon impact and carbon accounting to that level, so that a company is expected to account not just for its revenue, its P&L, but also expected to account for its carbon impact.”

100% renewable energy during manufacture

Earlier this month, I reported on how Lenovo is powering part of its Budapest manufacturing facility using solar energy. That’s hopefully the start of a trend towards sustainable manufacturing, which is another of Robert’s hopes for the future.

“I’m not speaking on behalf of Logitech here, but I would love a scenario where you imagine the EU in five years’ time demand that any electronics products that are permitted onto our market can only be manufactured using certified renewable energy sources,” he says.

“In reality, could that potentially disadvantage industry within the EU? Maybe. And is that the most appropriate thing for our governments to do? Who knows? Maybe not. But I think companies can make a difference. I think companies can say okay, we are shifting towards renewables on a collective basis, and we are centrally sourcing our materials on a renewable-only policy.”

Carbon transparency

Robert’s next wish – and he wanted to be clear, this is a personal wish rather than speaking as Logitech’s Head of Sustainability – concerns transparency.

“You’re familiar with the phrase ‘Sunlight is the best disinfectant’,” he says. “Full transparency requires a brand to share everything, and for everything to be shared. So that all the issues that could exist are known and addressed and managed.”

Naturally, the best illustration for this is cheese. “Cheese is branded in a certain way that there’s provenance associated with a part of the world. I think there’s a place in the future for the consumer, for you and me, to be able to access the provenance of a product that exists within our world, within our ecosystem. So if I have a mouse or keyboard on my desk, or a laptop or whatever, I want to be able to know where it came from, who made it, who benefited from it.”

That means transparency for every step in the supply chain. Where did the material come from? What was its carbon cost? “It’s a full transparency approach and that’s hugely ambitious,” says Robert, “but I’d like to live in a world where that exists.”

Use generative AI to share sustainability design knowledge

Generative AI has come under attack for the amount of energy it consumes, but Robert O’Mahony sees a way it can help businesses become more sustainable.

“AI has the capacity to consolidate [and] concentrate our knowledge, and then provide us with what we need to know,” he points out. And there’s a lot of data about sustainable design that’s currently hidden away in siloes, waiting to be tapped. “I would love to see – maybe as part of this alliance that I spoke about – some type of an AI assistant to help with sustainable design.”

So rather than each company having to “mine for knowledge” on its own, that knowledge can be “shared on a centralised basis. So when we figure something out, we plug that into the centralised AI. And then maybe another company that makes a product like ours, or that uses material like ours, gets the benefit of that. And quid pro quo.”

Related: Microsoft’s global renewable energy plan laid bare

Create a confidential carbon index

For manufacturers to give each product they make a carbon rating, they need to know details about every step of the supply chain. And that can mean asking awkward questions of suppliers.

“To give you a specific example, we would go to a supplier and say you make widget a in this location in this factory – we’d like to know your energy demand, your materials demand and your water consumption. All of these things.”

That supplier may get suspicious, explains Robert, and wonder if Logitech is trying to reverse-engineer the component being made. “We’re not. We’re simply trying to understand what the environmental impact is of that component. And we would gladly do that on a confidential basis.”

Because not all suppliers are willing to share such sensitive information, Logitech must estimate the carbon impact of some areas of its supply chain. If suppliers could submit the information via a confidential system – perhaps using blockchain, Robert suggests – then the data would become not only exact but also shareable across all manufacturers.

My thanks to Robert for sharing his time and his thoughts. You can read my interview with Robert from August last year and read Lee Grant’s thoughts on whether Logitech is a green and sustainable company.