07/11/2025
Green IT and ESG in Consumer Goods
In consumer goods, sustainability is a business reality. Whether you’re running factories, managing logistics, or leading digital operations, your ESG commitments shape how you invest, operate, and grow.
What’s changed is the visibility of IT. The energy your data centres consume, the number of devices in circulation, and how support teams travel and work all now matter to your environmental footprint.
As digital estates expand and AI workloads surge, IT contributes to emissions, waste, and cost. The opportunity? To turn that footprint into progress.
Sustainable IT support combines greener infrastructure choices and smarter use of digital insights to cut waste, avoid downtime, and build resilience.
Why sustainable IT support matters
CPG leaders are under pressure. Growth targets remain, but there’s now an expectation to reduce carbon and demonstrate ESG progress. According to Gartner, sustainable IT support is a top-three business priority globally.
Servers, cloud, endpoints, and their supporting logistics are growing fast. Data centres already consume 1–1.5% of the world’s electricity, and AI demand could push that higher, says McKinsey.
For consumer goods companies, ESG isn’t just about the supply chain; it’s about running IT day to day.
E-waste and device lifecycles
The Global E-waste Monitor 2024 reports the world produced 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022. Only 22% was properly collected or recycled. By 2030, that’s expected to reach 82 million tonnes.
CPG organisations are especially exposed. Every laptop, tablet, scanner, and POS device adds to emissions and waste totals.
Making IT greener
McKinsey talks about defence and offence in sustainable IT support. Defence is about reducing your own IT footprint.
1. Smarter Energy and Cloud Decisions
Not all cloud is equal. Choosing where workloads run and who powers them makes a huge difference. Accenture shows moving to renewable-powered cloud regions and optimising code can cut emissions by up to 90% compared with legacy estates.
Small actions add up. Schedule compute-heavy jobs when grids are cleanest. Use serverless or container-based models that scale only when needed. Ask cloud providers for transparent carbon data and include it in vendor rankings.
2. Sustainable AI and Efficient Architecture
AI is transformative but not carbon-neutral. Training a large model can emit as much CO₂ as several hundred flights. Practical solutions: right-size models, reuse trained components, run compute in cleaner regions.
3. Extend the Life of What You Already Have
Replacing a laptop a year later can reduce lifetime emissions by 30%. Refurbishing and reusing equipment can do more.
Modern IT support plays a key role. Remote diagnostics, modular repairs, and augmented-reality support help resolve issues without dispatching trucks or replacing hardware unnecessarily. Each avoided visit saves time, cost, and roughly 20–50 kg of CO₂e.
Using digital insights to cut waste
Offence is about using digital tools to cut waste across the business.
1. Predictive Monitoring and Remote Fixes
Predictive analytics can spot issues before they become outages. Fixing problems remotely or pre-emptively means less downtime, travel, and fewer scrapped materials.
McKinsey found predictive maintenance and digital twins can reduce energy and maintenance costs by 10–15%.
2. Experience Metrics as Sustainability Tools
Traditional SLAs measure uptime; Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) measure how well people can do their jobs. Improving user experience reduces waste: fewer reopened tickets, fewer revisits, fewer idle hours.
Faster resolutions mean fewer site visits; smoother onboarding means less lost productivity. These are measurable savings.
3. Digital, Paperless Workflows
Digitising field documentation and compliance logs saves paper, cuts errors, and accelerates work. Combined with secure mobile apps and IoT insights, it’s an easy win for efficiency and sustainability.
Where to start
0–3 months: Get your baseline
- Audit IT energy use across data centres, cloud, and endpoints
- Enable automated power management
- Encourage remote-first fixes and virtual support
- Use cloud regions with transparent renewable energy data
3–12 months: Embed insight and automation
- Introduce experience metrics (XLAs) alongside SLAs
- Roll out predictive monitoring to reduce downtime and truck rolls
- Pilot sustainable AI scheduling
- Track device lifecycle and carbon intensity
12+ months: Make it part of governance
- Bake Green IT metrics into ESG targets and reporting cycles
- Extend coverage to IT suppliers and logistics
- Shift procurement policies towards circularity: refurbish, reuse, recycle
- Build sustainability accountability into IT contracts and performance reviews
These steps turn sustainability into an operational advantage.
Bringing it all together
Every part of the IT ecosystem, energy, devices, logistics, support, affects your sustainability story. The more digital your business, the more these levers matter.
Sustainable IT Support connects those dots. It uses data, automation, and insight to make ESG real and measurable.
Or, as one CIO recently put it, “We’re not just keeping the lights on anymore; we’re deciding how green those lights are.”
If you’d like to discuss sustainable IT support, start a conversation with Getronics and talk to our team of experts.
