Sustainable solutions: A year in review
As we round out the year at Raspberry Pi, we’re reflecting on the work we’ve done to become more sustainable. Guided by our principles for sustainability, this year has seen us try new solutions and even gain some industry recognition, bolstering our commitment to making high-performance, low-cost computing products in an environmentally responsible way.
Laying the foundations: a year to build on
Improvements to our operations have been significant. Since January, we’ve detailed how intrusive reflow soldering has boosted our manufacturing efficiency, directly reducing our carbon footprint; how our ongoing efforts to reduce packaging continue to minimise waste, ensuring that our physical impact is as low as possible; and how expanding our carbon removal initiative through our partnership with UNDO is helping to permanently remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. Here, we introduced a new product, Raspberry Pi Carbon Removal Credits. Each credit mitigates the emissions associated with the manufacture and disposal of one modern Raspberry Pi.
We have also continued to celebrate receiving the London Stock Exchange’s Green Economy Mark, a prestigious award recognising that over 50% of our revenue comes from products and services with a positive environmental impact. The mark underscores how our dedication to accessible technology goes hand in hand with being environmentally conscious.
Underpinning all these efforts is our ongoing commitment to longevity. Designing products that last longer amplifies the impact of our other work to reduce electronic waste, and provides sustainable (not to mention functional) advantages to our industrial and home users.
What comes next
Our work is far from finished. With plans to improve our lifetime carbon analysis in the new year, we’re aiming to be more transparent as we become more sustainable, sharing our progress on the recently launched Raspberry Pi sustainability portal. This will serve as the main repository for information about our sustainability going forward. We encourage anyone who would like to stay up to date with our work in this area to take a look.
3 comments
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Ralph Corderoy
Has any calculation been done of the power consumption by all those Pis still using the shipped POWER_OFF_ON_HALT=0 EEPROM setting? Geerling says a new Pi 5 burns 1.2-1.6 W after poweroff(8); I could hear it so went digging into why. Please change this factory setting.
Paul S
Circularity: Trade-in programs, take-back schemes, and designing for disassembly ?
Anything like the above in the works ?
Raffah Siddiqui
Hello,
As someone who loves the planet but someone who is literally less than an hour into Raspberry Pi ownership. Openly ask your community of influencers / content creators and the community to focus on recycling old cellphone or electronic components. Technically one could even use the installer tool to load your OS onto old Macbooks or Netbooks yes? Idk when I went from an innocent kid building websites and robots to building tools for capitalism… but I felt like I had a healthy balance. AI water usage and energy usage is a real issue. Perhaps fund or ask for university phd level studies into power and water consumption from localized llms vs. the current existing way consumers are doing it and fuel some YouTube shorts about the solution to the impact of AI. We are all slowly becoming like Taylor Swift with her private jet without realising it. Idk though, I’m just some guy on the internet lol. But I think we can all agree: reusing old cell phone components by having a raspberry Pi Based cell phone kit would be an environmental landslide victory. I think your community could easily revive old OS’s of the past like Palm, Blackberry, Nokia, etc. using some sort of Linux skins. You could profit off of this by having an official mobile OS version and theoretically do an inverse Apple. I feel like you guys are ethical stewards of computing and as long as you don’t IPO the people would love you. Start out with nerds reviving old devices, but push your own build a phone kit to consumers.. and allow for some way to implement something like Samsung dex and boom.