THE BUSINESS OF SUSTAINABILITY
This three‑letter acronym refers to a company’s reporting framework that tracks environmental, social, and governance performance.
What is ESG?
This type of computing shifts workloads across time or geography to align electricity use with renewable‑energy availability.
What is load shifting?
This metals recovery process allows precious elements like gold and cobalt to be reclaimed from old electronics.
What is e‑waste recycling?
This type of greenhouse gas has a global warming potential over 80 times stronger than CO₂ over a 20‑year period.
What is methane?
This global convention, established in 1987, successfully phased out many ozone‑depleting chemicals like CFCs.
What is the Montreal Protocol?
Companies committed to “Scope 3 reductions” are targeting emissions from this part of their operations — the one they don’t directly control.
What is the supply chain?
As AI workloads grow, this metric — often expressed in megawatt-hours — measures the total energy used by a data center.
What is energy consumption?
Lithium‑ion batteries are considered this type of waste at end‑of‑life due to strict handling and disposal guidelines.
What is hazardous waste?
This tipping point refers to the melting of massive ice sheets, which could cause irreversible sea‑level rise.
What is the ice‑sheet collapse tipping point?
This biodiversity “hotspot” spans multiple Southeast Asian nations and is one of the most threatened tropical forest regions on Earth.
What is the Coral Triangle?
This sustainability strategy aims to ensure a product has value at each stage of its lifecycle, often measured through cradle‑to‑cradle analysis.
What is circularity?
This efficiency metric, known as PUE, evaluates how effectively a data center uses power by comparing total facility energy to IT energy.
What is Power Usage Effectiveness?
Modern tech manufacturers increasingly measure product impact using LCA, an acronym standing for this comprehensive assessment.
What is Life Cycle Assessment?
This planetary boundary, often exceeded by industrial agriculture, relates to the overuse of nitrogen and phosphorus.
What is biogeochemical flows?
This term refers to the rate at which a forest stores carbon in its biomass, often expressed in metric tons per hectare.
What is carbon stock?
Increasingly adopted by tech firms, this practice prices carbon internally so teams feel the financial impact of emitting greenhouse gases.
What is an internal carbon price?
Tech companies increasingly sign PPAs to secure clean power; the acronym stands for this type of long‑term energy contract.
What is a Power Purchase Agreement?
This design philosophy encourages companies to build devices that are easier to take apart, repair, and recycle.
What is design for disassembly?
This term describes the amount of carbon an ecosystem can absorb before reaching saturation.
What is carbon sequestration capacity?
These ocean zones, formed by nutrient pollution, contain so little oxygen that marine life cannot survive.
What are dead zones?
This “market mechanism” allows companies to fund external emissions‑reduction projects to balance their own carbon footprint.
What are carbon offsets?
This advanced cooling technique uses outside air to regulate server temperatures, reducing reliance on traditional HVAC systems.
What is free cooling?
Microchips rely heavily on this rare‑earth element used in magnets, whose mining has major environmental consequences.
What is neodymium?
This climate phenomenon disrupts weather patterns globally by warming surface waters in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean.
What is El Niño?
This atmospheric circulation pattern, also called the Brewer–Dobson circulation, transports ozone from the tropics toward the poles.
What is stratospheric circulation?