Digital Company and the environment, how the tech giants fight climate change
According to Forbes, as of March 2020, he is the richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $110.5 billion, making him one of the most influential men of the contemporary age. His name is Jeff Bezos and he is the founder and CEO of Amazon, the largest Internet company in the world.
Just a few weeks ago, he announced on his Instagram account the launch of the Bezos Earth Fund to counter the effects of climate change. Bezos explained that he personally endowed the fund with $10 billion “to get started” and that the first grants to researchers, activists and NGOs will be awarded in the summer.
The decision comes 20 days after 300 Amazon employees called for more climate efforts by the company, criticizing its environmental policy. Employees who join Amazon Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ) are pushing the e-commerce giant to review its environmental policies.
The criticism concerns the environmental plan presented on September 19 by Bezos, who announced that Amazon will achieve zero emissions in 2040. According to the AECJ, the company is expected to aim for carbon neutrality in 2030.
As evidence of how the Seattle giant cares about the future of the planet are the statements of Mariangela Marseglia, Country Manager of Amazon Italy and Spain.
“We are strongly committed to the battle against climate change,” said Marseglia, “and there is no time to lose. It is an urgent issue that concerns us all and requires concrete and immediate action. We have made an ambitious commitment,” Marseglia continues, “to achieve the Paris Agreement 10 years in advance. We believe that global companies like ours can make a difference in driving change and inspiring other companies to do the same.”
“We have ordered 100,000 electric vans, we will power our global infrastructure with renewable energy through the installation of large plants and cover 80% of our needs with green energy by 2024 and 100% by 2030, we have created a fund of more than $100 million to restore and protect forests and remove carbon from the atmosphere immediately. Finally, we continue with our commitment to reduce packaging with dedicated programs. Thanks to these programs, we have reduced packaging waste by 25% since 2015 alone.”
For some time now, other “tech companies” have also been starting to think about the enormous impact that the activities they carry out on a daily basis have on ecosystems. What many people don’t know, in fact, is that in the technological field it is possible to think about the energy consumption required by data centers and the importance of making them “zero impact”, through choices that concern in particular the power supply, UPS and air conditioning systems.
Aruba, for example, is one of the companies that has invested in respect of the environment right from the start and today manages to save about 18 million tons of CO2 per year. The Global Cloud Data Center in Aruba, near Milan, uses renewable energy with Guarantee of Origin (GO) certification. And that’s not all. The campus itself has its own hydroelectric power plant and numerous photovoltaic panels that contribute to the production of the necessary energy. In short, these are initiatives aimed at “lightening” our presence on this planet.
Still in the tech field, almost half of Apple’s carbon footprint concerns the electricity used in production processes and therefore, as the company has stated, it is necessary that The entire supply chain switches to renewable sources. That’s why Apple suppliers “have committed to producing more than 4 gigawatts of clean energy by 2020 — nearly one-third of the electricity” used to make the company’s products in 2018.
In addition, all offices, Apple Stores and data centers (located in forty-three countries) are powered by renewable energy. “This has allowed us, since 2011, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions related to the activities of our facilities by 64%,” they say from Cupertino, the heart of Silicon Valley.
Today, climate change is the biggest challenge we face and for this reason in the next decade the technologies of the so-called “fourth industrial revolution”, in particular 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), will provide essential tools to increase efficiency in the economy and to prepare for increasingly sustainable models of life and progressively abandoning fossil fuels.
