As organizations around the world look to balance their growth objectives with the need to build sustainable businesses, it is important to ensure that balance extend to the use of technology as well. While tech solutions can help solve environmental issues, IT as a whole, has a significant carbon footprint itself. For instance, data centers represented nearly 1% of the world’s energy demand in 2019.1 And 

the digital acceleration that we have seen during the COVID-19 pandemic will further increase the enterprise IT carbon footprint.

The tech industry is urgently addressing this critical issue. For example, Microsoft is experimenting with approaches that help reduce the energy requirements of data centers. Microsoft’s Project Natick, for instance, aims at testing the performance and energy efficiency of underwater data centers.2 But this focus on sustainable IT does not seem to be important 

for most organizations. We found, for instance, that 89% of organizations recycle less than 10% of their IT hardware.