Environmental labelling for data centers is no longer an option!

Since January 1^st, 2022, the AGEC law has required internet service providers and telecom operators to inform their subscribers of the greenhouse gas emissions equivalent of their data consumption. This obligation applies to both physical and virtual operators, and to fixed and mobile networks. The environmental impact assessment enabling this labelling must be carried out in accordance with the methodology made available to the relevant stakeholders by ADEME, drafted by a technical committee led by the NegaOctet® consortium.

In the spirit of the law, the primary purpose of environmental labelling is to raise consumer awareness of the ecological footprint of their online practices. It is also intended to encourage hardware manufacturers and digital service providers to assess their environmental performance at a given point in time, improve it over time, and thus display their progress.

While today only internet service providers and telecom operators are required to provide environmental labelling, this does not mean that the other players involved in the digital service value chain do not need to be able to measure their environmental impacts—particularly data center operators.

Moreover, the latter are increasingly being asked to share their environmental data. Indeed, the Éco Énergie Tertiaire decree already requires operators of tertiary-use buildings, including data centers, to continuously optimize and submit online their buildings’ energy consumption on ADEME’s OPERAT platform. In addition, to refine the measurement of the digital sector’s environmental footprint, Arcep plans to expand the scope of its environmental barometer, and therefore its data collection from data center operators.

Many frameworks, standards, methodologies and best practices already exist internationally to measure the environmental impact of digital services: International Telecommunication Union (ITU) frameworks, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG), and NF EN ISO 14040 and 14044 (based on life cycle assessment, LCA, methodology).

In addition, as part of the standardisation of the rules promoted by the European Commission, sector-specific frameworks are being developed: PCRs (Product Category Rules) and PEFCRs (Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules). These sector-specific frameworks for environmental labelling aim to harmonise all elements—and therefore the associated frameworks—within a single, unified methodology, and to differentiate the rules according to the specificities of the targeted products or services.

To date, ADEME has published two separate PCRs: the “Digital Services” PCR, defining the general rules for all digital services, and the “Internet Access Provision” PCR, specific to networks and limited to the scope of the AGEC law.

Regarding the calculation of the environmental footprint of data centers, a specific PCR is currently being developed, with publication scheduled for November 2022. This PCR will take into account:

• the life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology, taking into account the recommendations of Standard 14044 and ITU frameworks;
• a multi-criteria approach to go beyond the sole CO² / greenhouse gas indicator, and including other environmental impacts: resource depletion, water stress, waste generation, etc.;
• the specificities of these buildings and technical rooms, as well as the IT equipment hosted there.

Based on this premise, the aim is to verify that the characteristics are similar in order to compare environmental impacts between two data centers of the same type. Using a single, objective methodology shared by all helps ensure that the environmental impact assessment has been carried out under the same rules: comprehensive life cycle inventories, mandatory inclusion of certain equipment whose impact is considered negative, etc.

When it comes to data centers, the complexity of environmental labelling projects lies in the difficulty of accessing inventory data—in other words, data on the equipment used for IT systems (physical servers, network equipment, cooling solutions) as well as for building-related aspects (premises, electricity, etc.). Not all manufacturers and builders share this data systematically, and their LCA methodologies can vary significantly. Yet if the input data is missing or distorted, the results of environmental labelling will also be inaccurate.

To fill these gaps, ADEME publishes the IMPACTS® database, which aggregates a range of information and data on all the characteristics required to measure environmental impact. However, in many cases, this data comes from technical literature and is therefore not verifiable. The NegaOctet® consortium publishes an equivalent database, with data derived from real measurements, which is gradually being integrated into the Impacts database (60 characteristics to date) to enable companies offering digital services to measure their environmental impact on solid, standardised, multi-criteria foundations.

These foundations are therefore both the first step towards awareness and real impact reduction—and they will also contribute to tomorrow’s business development, in a society where consumers are increasingly attentive to the environmental and social impact of the products and services they purchase. There is no doubt that companies that quickly display their environmental impact, as well as the actions they are taking to reduce it, will have a virtuous competitive advantage over those that do not.

By Sofia Benqassem, Project Manager, APL Data Center.