(Photo Credit: Bastian Pudill, Unsplash)San Francisco-based Dropbox has announced new sustainability goals for 2030. Environmental targets for the document management software company include sourcing energy for their operations from 100% renewable sources.
Dropbox also plans to achieve carbon neutrality for Scope 1, 2, and 3 business travel emissions within 10 years. In addition to their headquarters, the company has 12 offices globally. Currently they have around 2,800 employees, according to Bloomberg.
Although the company hasn’t released a detailed sustainability strategy yet, Dropbox executives indicated that they would examine day-to-day business practices for opportunities to reduce business travel and help employees work remotely more efficiently.
With at least 600 million registered users across 180 countries, Dropbox said that it relies on data centers to deliver its products. To tackle direct Scope 1 and indirect Scope 2 emissions, Dropbox aims to invest in technologies and systems that lower its operations’ energy consumption, especially at data centers in the United States and servers located in Australia, Germany, and Japan, Edie.net reported. “The business hopes to decouple energy consumption from storage capacity,” the outlet noted.
One way the company seeks to increase storage capacity while lowering energy output is through technology such as shingled magnetic recording (SMR) for storage drives. Last year, Dropbox said that transitioning to SMR produced cost and energy savings.
“SMR drives have a lower power footprint, so we’re realizing savings by using the new 14-terabyte drives compared to the previous 8-terabyte drives. In essence, we are working with much denser racks, but our power draw has increased only marginally,” their engineers wrote. “And we have been able to increase the number of storage disks from 60 to 100 on a single machine while maintaining the same CPU and memory.”
The company committed to sourcing energy for operations entirely from renewable sources by 2030. In 2014, Dropbox announced plans to help power their San Francisco office with a 25.2-kilowatt solar PV system designed by UGE, Solar Power World reported.
The following year, however, Greenpeace’s “Click Clean Scorecard” said that the company lacked renewable energy investments, energy transparency, and commitment to renewable energy goals. At the time, the nonprofit found that Dropbox used 17% “clean” energy compared to 33% coal, 27% gas, and 20% nuclear.
Now Dropbox seems to be changing course. “Climate scientists widely agree that global greenhouse gas emissions must be decreased by at least 50% by 2030 to limit global warming to below 1.5°C and avoid the worst impacts of climate change such as severe heatwaves, seas rising, more exposure to climate-related risks, and poverty,” the company said this week. “We know we have a role to play in limiting our own impact.”
