Sustainable IT Strategies and Resources
IT’s role and responsibilities in sustainability are now more important—and expansive—than ever. Learn how to drive sustainability at your organization and across the entire technology life cycle.
Increase Your Impact on Sustainability with a Holistic Approach
Companies are increasingly asking IT to help achieve their larger environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals and meet complex standards and regulations. This means even more responsibilities on your plate to find ways to increase your sustainability impact. At Intel, we’re focused on helping businesses like yours tackle their ambitious ESG goals by innovating on all fronts—hardware, software, services, and tools—to reduce the carbon footprint of everyone in our ecosystem and provide improved end-to-end sustainability that helps you maximize your technology investments.
Incorporate Sustainability at Every Stage of the PC Life Cycle
Forward-thinking leaders are exploring ways to have a greater overall impact by improving sustainability throughout the entire device life cycle—from the moment sand becomes silicon to when a device is finally retired.
Explore the PC life cycle and discover actionable ideas to bring sustainable IT practices into your organization.
Reevaluate Vendor and OEM Choices
Your technology investments can have a big impact on your company’s overall sustainability strategy, so it’s critical to select technology vendors, OEM partners, and end user devices that support your own organization’s sustainability goals. Here are three key sustainability criteria to consider when evaluating potential vendors.
Sustainability Track Record
Request a vendor’s sustainability performance report to get better visibility into their manufacturing processes, supply chain relationships, material sourcing, e-waste management, device recycling practices, and overall environmental impact. With these insights, you can more easily determine if this vendor supports your ESG goals.
Industry Standards
With more than 600 sustainability standards, initiatives, frameworks, and guidelines in use today,1 it can be difficult to know which apply to your vendors. Three of the most common sustainability standards to rely on are benchmarking, certification, and disclosure. To help with your assessment, look for third-party certifications, such as Energy Star, TCO, and Global Electronics Council’s EPEAT.
Vendor Reporting Assistance
Compiling data for your own ESG reporting is time-consuming, especially if you have a large roster of vendors. Ensure your vendor is open to regular collaboration and sharing of pertinent sustainability information so you can lean on their assistance to make your reporting efforts more efficient and streamlined.
Rethink Aspects of PC Life Cycle Management
Your company’s sustainable IT practices should infuse sustainable strategies across the entire asset life cycle—including the manufacturing, buying, managing, and disposing of inventory.
Manufacturing
IT sustainability starts at the manufacturing and supplier level. Before selecting your vendor, ask how their PCs are manufactured and provisioned. Does the manufacturer follow sustainable manufacturing practices? Are minerals and materials sourced responsibly ? Is the manufacturer making efforts to explore conflict material alternatives?
Buying
To help extend PC life and minimize landfill waste, consider buying from vendors that offer new technologies and system components that improve battery life, increase device durability to minimize the constant need to replace broken devices, and are easier to reuse, repurpose, and recycle.
Managing
How efficiently your devices run can be just as important as where they come from and how they’re built. Look for devices that exceed industry efficiency standards, have remote manageability features, or offer both—like those based on Intel® technologies. Intel-based OEM notebooks exceed Energy Star 8.0 efficiency requirements by up to 68 percent.2 And devices on Intel vPro® come with integrated remote manageability features that can help save you up to 28 metric tons of CO2 emissions per year3 by reducing deskside IT support as well as increase energy efficiency by up 20 percent.4
Disposing
Look for vendors that provide or enable better end-of-life options for assets. Questions to ask at this life cycle stage include: Does this vendor participate in circular supply chain initiatives? Are asset materials easily recyclable? Do the vendor suppliers have practices in place for upcycling of waste?
Explore PC Performance Optimization Options
Just as important as the type of device you select is how that device performs. Look into the device’s energy efficiency and options for further performance optimization. For example, PCs based on Intel® Core™ processors include Intel® Dynamic Tuning Technology with tools like Intel® Energy Performance Optimizer, designed to improve performance per watt to help users get more out of their devices.5
Delve into Device Packaging and Recycling
How a device is packaged and recycled can impact the overall sustainability of a product. However, packaging and recycling is much more than just the box your PC comes in. It includes the practices that were followed to source the materials to create the packaging. To determine if the device you’re considering aligns with your goals, consider asking questions like these: Are packaging materials biobased or compostable? Are raw materials responsibly sourced? Can all the packaging components be recycled locally? Does the vendor provide options for e-waste management or reselling?
Discover the Sustainability Benefits of the Intel vPro® Platform
As IT’s role in helping to meet ESG goals expands, PCs built on the Intel vPro® platform deliver built-in sustainability benefits for business throughout the device life cycle, from build to retire.
Explore how Intel vPro® features and integrated technologies can help positively impact the sustainability efforts at your business.
Sustainability Incorporated from the Start
We’re committed to sustainable computing and more environmentally conscious manufacturing so you can equip your team with the right device without worrying about the environmental impact of the manufacturing process. In 2022 alone, we achieved 93 percent renewable energy use, conservation of over 9.6 billion gallons of water, and upcycled 67 percent of our manufacturing waste into our supply chain.6 7 Additionally, over 90 percent of devices built on Intel vPro® and registered by the Global Electronics Council achieve certifications as EPEAT Silver or better based on their environmental performance.8
Tech That Optimizes PC Operations
Devices on Intel vPro® include Intel® Dynamic Tuning Technology, which saves energy by sensing user activity and battery capacity to optimize performance and responsiveness and automatically conserving and regulating power consumption for better efficiency. The wake features of Intel® Active Management Technology (Intel® AMT) allow you to shut down machines during off hours or schedule devices to power on in intervals to conserve energy.
More-Sustainable Management and Maintenance
Intel vPro® devices come equipped with Intel® AMT and Intel® Endpoint Management Assistant (Intel® EMA), which enable remote management of PCs. Using remote manageability to conduct remote repairs can help IT avoid as many as 2,000 truck rolls3 and time-consuming and costly device shipments.9
Device End of Life Reimagined
Tools such as Intel® Remote Platform Erase and Intel® Platform Service Record enable you to responsibly retire or remediate devices. IT can remotely assess the history of the distant or hard-to-reach asset, including usage and event details, and decide if it should be retired or remotely wiped for recycling or reuse. This helps avoid unnecessary SSD destruction, preventing e-waste.
From Words to Action: Sustainability at Intel
Sustainability is at the heart of our business. It’s one of four key tenets within our 2030 RISE strategy and goals . It’s embedded in everything we do—from integrating sustainable IT practices and goals in our own operations and supply chain to creating a more sustainable PC life cycle from build to retire10 to improving the energy efficiency of our products.
See our recent sustainability accomplishments in our 2022-23 Intel Corporate Responsibility Report.
Explore the third-party recognition we are honored to receive for our efforts.
ISS ESG Rating
No. 1 rating in both Environment & Social Quality Score11 12.
See How Others Achieve Sustainability Success with Intel vPro®
Find Sustainable IT Resources
Discover information, guides, and reports about sustainability in IT industry and how Intel is helping to build a more sustainable future.
Frequently Asked Questions
Sustainable IT encompasses specific strategies, practices, and technologies that help IT departments improve their sustainability impact within an organization. Sustainable IT strategies and practices are often created and executed to help an organization reach their larger ESG goals. Sustainable IT technologies are electronics that are purposefully sourced, manufactured, packaged, used, and disposed of in ways that minimize their environmental impact.
Examples of sustainable IT practices that organizations can employ include reevaluating current vendors and establishing sustainability criteria that future partners must meet in order to do business with your company, only purchasing devices that meet certain industry sustainability standards, or finding new ways to recycle, reuse, and repurpose technologies before sending them to the landfill.