10 October 2025
What is digital sustainability?
Sustainability is often associated with sorting waste, saving energy or using less paper. But behind our digital services lies a less visible part of our environmental footprint. Every photo we upload on social media, every AI query we run and every dataset we keep for years consumes energy. Data centres, cooling systems and electronic waste are rarely visible but form a growing network that enables our digital habits. Invisible but not without consequences.
At the same time, our digital consumption is rising exponentially. We are spending more time online, web pages are becoming increasingly heavier and building digital services that are increasingly complex. Several reports, such as those by the United Nations and DEFRA Digital, show that the environmental impact of ICT continues to increase globally. Digital sustainability is no longer a niche topic: it is becoming an essential part of future-proof design.
Fortunately, the approach does not have to be radical or technically complex. With thoughtful design choices and small, pragmatic interventions, you can significantly reduce the digital footprint of your services. Especially when you apply them at scale: think of a website or application used by thousands of people every day.
(Re)designing services with a view to sustainability
Small steps, big impact
Digital sustainability does not have to be a complete transformation. A few seemingly small design choices can yield immediate results.
- Fewer font variations on the future Aquafin website: less unnecessary data, faster loading, lower impact.
- Differently constructed tables in RSVZ's internal application: reducing the need to retrieve external data.
These kinds of optimisations are subtle, but for intensively used services, they lead to structural savings.
Future-proof (re)designs
If you want to go a step further, look again at the user journey. By simplifying, automating or smartly organising steps, you not only improve sustainability, but often also ease of use and internal efficiency.
A striking example is the proactive service of the City of Ghent. By granting certain rights automatically, processes become more inclusive and efficient. At the same time, the number of physical trips and paper letters decrease. Accessibility, sustainability and efficiency reinforce each other.
Other examples show the same pattern: switching from sales to rental models, or delivering parcels at distribution points instead of at home. Rethinking the service itself creates much broader gains than in purely digital optimisations.
Why this matters for innovation and project teams
Professionals working on new services and digital ecosystems, from innovation managers to product owners, are uniquely positioned to accelerate sustainable choices. After all, much of the impact is created at the design stage: what flows are enabled? What data will be collected? How complex or simple is the journey?
Digital sustainability is therefore not just about technology, but about vision, choices and design. Much impact already arises from decisions that seem relatively small today. Do you opt for a few recurring strong images or different pictures on each page every time? Do users need to upload documents or can you reuse data? Do you maintain a complex flow because it has ‘always been this way’, or do you investigate whether a shorter, smarter variant works better?
Our own projects also show how concrete this can become. At Housing Pass, we saw that centralising data sources not only improved service, but also improved digital sustainability because users no longer have to gather all the data about their homes themselves.
Those who start with targeted optimisations today build robust, efficient and future-proof services for tomorrow.
References
- Statik - 5 myths about digital sustainability debunked
- DEFRA Digital - Why sustainable ICT is vital
- Knight Moves - Buildingpassport
- City of Ghent - Proactive service provision
- Knight Moves - What is accessibility and why is it important?
- United Nations - UN TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT CALLS FOR SUSTAINABLE AND EQUITABLE STRATEGIES TO MITIGATE DIGITAL ECONOMY'S GROWING ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
