City of Amsterdam – Understanding the true price of data storage
Client
The City of Amsterdam is continuously looking for ways to translate its sustainability ambitions into concrete actions. As part of its climate strategy, the municipality wanted to gain insight into the societal costs of its digital infrastructure – specifically the impact of data storage.
Project description
In line with its sustainability goals, the City of Amsterdam asked Impact Institute to calculate the true price of data storage. The aim was to provide a well-founded first insight into the actual societal costs of storing 1 TB of data per year – with a focus on environmental costs that are not currently internalised.
Impact Institute conducted the analysis using existing life cycle assessment (LCA) data. The assessment covered the full lifecycle of data storage – from hardware production to the energy consumption of data centres. End-of-life impacts of servers and data centres were also included.
Benefits to the client
Thanks to this project, the City of Amsterdam now has a concrete starting point to steer towards more sustainable data use. The results show that the environmental costs of data storage are more than twice the market price – mainly due to water use in production and CO₂ emissions during the use phase.
These insights help raise internal awareness and can inform policy and behavioural changes. Moreover, this project provides a foundation for broader discussions on making digital infrastructure more sustainable within the public sector.
