Sustainable software

Map and measure your technology carbon emissions and take pragmatic mitigation steps that align your organisation's technology strategy with its sustainability strategy.

Sustainability goals are intrinsic to modern organisations and yet there is a general lack of understanding of how to make software truly sustainable. Software has real-world impacts and risks that need to be considered and mitigated.

Before you can take action, you need to baseline your current emissions across your technology estate – but this is not straightforward. Sometimes, sustainability considerations may be at odds with the general thrust of your technology strategy; for example, on-premises may in some cases be preferable to cloud in terms of carbon emissions. It’s a complex landscape to navigate, but we can help.

In this section

Achieve your goals with us

At Scott Logic, we understand that truly sustainable software is financially, ethically, operationally and environmentally sustainable. We advise on and implement sustainable solutions across a series of sustainability themes.

We go beyond just green and carbon considerations to design and build software that balances the many trade-offs – including impacts to ongoing software costs, impacts to users, and security and risk considerations – while aligning sustainability with organisational quality goals.

We help you understand and measure the holistic sustainability trade-offs in enterprise software and data platforms. We then guide you to take pragmatic steps to reduce the impact of software projects on people and the natural environment.

While climate action is important, there is a danger in over-indexing on carbon emission calculation rather than looking at pragmatic steps that provide balanced sustainable outcomes including, but not limited to, CO₂e emissions reduction. Our holistic view is summarised below:

Diagram offering an holistic view of sustainable software

Technology Carbon Standard

We created and open-sourced the Technology Carbon Standard (TCS), now recommended by the UK Government in the GDS Service Manual. The TCS enables consistent analysis and benchmarking of your technology carbon footprint. By mapping your IT estate into categories analogous to Greenhouse Gas Protocol scopes, you can more easily identify the most carbon-intensive areas to prioritise for impact reduction.

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Our tried-and-tested solutions

While our approach is always tailored to your needs, we have a range of tried-and-tested solutions that speed up delivery and drive a successful outcome.

Technology Carbon Estimator

The Technology Carbon Estimator is designed to give a high-level overview of the possible areas of carbon impact within your IT estate. The estimations are framed within our proposed model of tech emissions – the Technology Carbon Standard.

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Cloud Carbon and Cost Assessment

We turn your cloud optimisation aspirations into reality by conducting a comprehensive assessment of your cloud emissions and costs in a matter of weeks.

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Man writing on a whiteboard in a meeting

Sustainable software strategy and architecture

We help you develop a green software strategy that aligns your sustainability goals with technology transformation. And you can trust that the impartial advice we provide on your architectural choices will be independent of vendor greenwashing.

Two people at a desk discussing something displayed on a computer screen

Efficient and sustainable software development practices

For years, hardware was used to solve problems due to perceived low costs. However, considering environmental and long-term financial impacts, it isn't cheap. We help your teams adopt sustainable practices to manage technical debt and refactor legacy code for better efficiency, maintainability, and reduced costs.

Transforming legacy to sustainable

We evaluate on-premises investments and legacy platforms to determine modernisation needs for productivity and sustainability. We assess skills, support, security, infrastructure, and environmental impact to recommend modernisation options – and we can support implementation.

Our work in sustainable software

Find out more about our client and internal sustainable software projects.

InferESG

In response to a FinTech Scotland innovation challenge, and working with aberdeen as project sponsor, we created an innovative tool that leverages Generative AI to transform the task of validating data disclosed in regulatory reports – starting with ESG, but adaptable to a wide range of use cases.

Read the case study

A set of home renovation tools and colour charts

Kingfisher

By harnessing our Technology Carbon Standard, we supported Kingfisher in pursuit of its sustainability goals by providing a comprehensive assessment of its technology estate’s carbon footprint, with actionable insights for mitigations.

Read the case study

International standards

For the green and carbon considerations, we align our approach with open source and science-backed, cross-industry frameworks such as the GHG Protocol and Green Software Foundation.

We don’t just accept the numbers that vendors generate, we take a pragmatic approach to calculating and validating the impacts of software.

Where possible, this includes the embodied carbon footprint (impacts associated with the creation of systems) as well as the energy consumption from running systems.

We apply those same international standards to Scott Logic in pursuit of our aim to be a more sustainable business. They underpin our ambitious net zero targets. And the same ethos lies behind both the annual, independent assessment of our sustainability, and our commitment as a B Corp to be part of a global movement helping to shape an inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economy.

From the blog

GenAI sustainability: a review of the 2025 numbers

A year after predicting GenAI's sustainability crisis, the 2024/25 financial data tells a concerning story. OpenAI's $10 billion revenue comes with $5 billion losses, whilst Anthropic burns $3-4 billion annually. With the sector consuming over $100 billion in venture funding and Big Tech spending $250 billion on AI infrastructure, we're witnessing what some critics are now calling a "subprime AI crisis" – an entire industry built on services sold at massive losses. The transparency initiatives from Hugging Face's AI Energy Score and the shift towards open source models (now 46% of enterprise preference) offer hope for a more sustainable GenAI 2.0 focused on efficiency over scale.

Oliver Cronk

Futuristic wind turbines spin in digital landscape, symbolising transition to zero carbon economy

Making Digital Emissions Data Work Better: How We Built the Technology Carbon Standard Schema

Scott Logic created the Technology Carbon Standard Schema, an open-source tool that helps companies measure and share their digital carbon emissions data. With the ICT sector consuming 4% of global electricity, most organisations lack standardised ways to track their technology-related carbon footprint. The schema provides a structured format for measuring and exchanging this data between companies.

David Rees

Two men collaborating at a desk, with one pointing at a computer screen.

Commercial product selection reflections

In the course of building a new system for a client over the past year, we evaluated and selected a couple of commercial software products to use as components of that system. In this post, I’ll share some observations and thoughts which may be of interest or help you with your next selection.

Robat Williams

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