Green Deal - Because it is our duty?

[suchona.kani.z]

With the Green Deal, the EU wants to tackle climate protection properly. In addition to the goal of zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, economic growth is to be decoupled from resource use. A key goal is therefore to oblige manufacturers to make products more durable and easier to repair. But it is not just the quality of the hardware that contributes to a longer product lifespan, but also the design of the software. In this blog post, I show how programming contributes to the longevity of products and how programs themselves can be designed to conserve resources.

The Origins
You can think what you want about the EU Green Deal. But the goal is for us to move away from a throwaway society and towards greater sustainability. In the past, there have been positive approaches, such as a data center with its own tidal power plant, but unfortunately also negative ones, such as the discussion about the "unplanned" drop in netherlands consumer email list performance of iPhones as the battery gets older. I don't want my son to have to search through a data archive like Wall-E, fascinated by learning what corals or trees are. So the question is: what can we do in development to help?

The field is larger than one might think at first glance. With this article, I would like to raise awareness of the topic. Be it as a consultant who wants to use it as a positive sales argument, or in development out of laziness to make their own software easier to maintain. In this article, we'll scratch the surface a little; the topic is currently being covered in the CoP New Technologies (Line of Business Insurance). Further information is available there.

What does sustainability mean in software
We have probably all come across what makes a physical product sustainable at one point or another:

Renewable raw materials
Renewable energy
recyclability
But none of these arguments apply to software. We can duplicate software (in the truest sense of the word) as often as we want at the push of a button. Rare earths or CO2-intensive transport routes have no place here. Or do they?

Sustainability in software means using the given resources as efficiently as possible.

Wrong thought! An article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung already highlights some major problems. According to it, the Internet causes a similar amount of greenhouse gases as global air traffic. In times of Corona and home office, this is likely to have increased even more.