Environmental impacts of electronic communications

Goal: create a certification process that measures and recognizes organizations’ digital sustainability efforts year after year.

Together with commercial companies, educational institutions and public organizations, a study is being developed to work towards the creation of a certification process. COREACT certification will allow organisations to measure their progress in digital sustainability.

COREACT certificates are a commitment to improving their behaviour in the digital environment, thereby reinforcing their public image as leaders in sustainability.

In the long term, we at Generations have the ambition to become a reference point for digital sustainability in Slovakia and to create a model that could be adapted and applied in other countries.

The subject of the study is to find out whether firms or companies are addressing the efficiency of electronic communication in an era when there is a push for automation and digitalization or whether they are not yet addressing this area.

Electronic communication, i.e. the volume and frequency of data communicated, also has an impact on the carbon footprint and the environment.

We want to find out how big this issue is in the Slovak Republic with the ambition to be a leader in the proposed measures and solutions to reduce the carbon footprint. We are primarily interested in the volume of data (anonymised) that companies store, manage, communicate and at what frequency, both internally to employees and externally to customers, partners or the public.

The study focuses primarily on data volume and frequency findings in 4 areas:

• email communication
• web
• overall work with data
• use of software and reading applications and tools, as well as online and social media campaigns

The study is carried out on a sample of 29 firms in 3 sectors – public administration, manufacturing and service firms and evaluates 93 indicators.