Sustainable solutions with Raspberry Pi
At Raspberry Pi, we have always been keen to do things that are more sustainable. Our products are intrinsically small and low-power, which makes them efficient in terms of resource usage (materials, shipping, electricity); Raspberry Pi devices can replace more resource-hungry solutions in many applications that would traditionally use a legacy x86 PC, such as digital signage. They also enable innovative approaches to improving the environment or people’s lives – including, of course, Raspberry Pi’s founding mission to make cheap computers and computing resources readily available to all to support learning.
When Raspberry Pi floated on the London Stock Exchange on 11 June 2024, we were proud to be awarded the LSE’s Green Economy Mark. The Mark recognises that not only are our products efficient in terms of resource usage, they also enable the displacement of other, less sustainable, technologies.
We’ve also worked to reduce the environmental impact of our manufacturing and shipping. Over time we have reduced our use of plastic packaging and shrunk product carton and shipper sizes, as well as working on more efficient production methods such as the new intrusive reflow soldering process for Raspberry Pi 5. The latter both saves energy and reduces the physical manufacturing footprint at the factory, while increasing throughput. As well as benefitting the environment, all of these initiatives improve our products’ cost structure, increasing efficiency and allowing us to keep our prices lower.
Now that we are a public limited company, we have formalised the role of sustainability within the business, with a Sustainability Committee to oversee activities like these. The committee monitors our performance using various metrics such as CO₂ emissions and materials use, comes up with future targets, and challenges the team to develop a strategy to achieve them. Raspberry Pi aims to be a leader in sustainable practices within the technology sector while maintaining our core focus on providing affordable and accessible technology for all. Below we explore the key principles that guide our sustainability strategy, and look at how we calculate our impact in terms of carbon emissions.
Guiding principles for sustainable practices
Raspberry Pi is firmly committed to sustainability alongside our responsibility to our shareholders. Our commitment is driven by the beliefs of our founders, our team, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, our largest shareholder and a charity focused on digital skills education. Customers quite rightly value credible and meaningful sustainability initiatives, which often have an important positive impact on brand reputation and market share, and we are able to balance these activities with the need to perform in a price-sensitive market. It goes without saying that we will adhere to all UK sustainability laws and regulations transparently, and we will also monitor voluntary best practices and adopt them where we can.
As well as monitoring and reducing our own CO₂ footprint, we are conscious of emissions generated by the many third parties we rely on for supply of materials and services – components, shipping, and so on. Encouraging suppliers to reduce their environmental impact is central to Raspberry Pi’s approach, and we are beginning to engage with all our suppliers, asking them to quantify the carbon content in their products. Over time we will consider the “carbon cost” of what we purchase (broadly, the cost of an equivalent high-quality carbon offset), as well as the base item cost, when we do our costing calculations. So, for example, a diode from one manufacturer may appear cheaper than one from another manufacturer, but if the carbon cost of the first is higher, we would take this into account and might choose the second. Over time this will favour lower-carbon solutions and encourage manufacturers to supply lower-carbon products.
Raspberry Pi prioritises keeping our products affordable and accessible, empowering customers to make informed choices about offsetting their own carbon footprint. This allows us to maintain profitability and maximise our contribution to the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s charitable mission, which remains a core objective for the company.
Measuring emissions
It’s imporant that our sustainability efforts are both transparent and accountable. To this end, we are actively measuring our carbon footprint across what are known as Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, and we have developed a methodology to assess our environmental impact as accurately as possible.
Scope 1 and 2 emissions
Scope 1 emissions are the direct emissions from sources owned or controlled by a company, while Scope 2 emissions are indirect emissions from generating the energy that the company purchases. Scope 2 includes emissions from electricity, heating, and cooling that the company consumes; although the company doesn’t produce these emissions directly, it is still responsible for them because they result from its energy consumption.
For Raspberry Pi, Scope 1 and 2 are lumped together, since we don’t have any energy-generating assets that emit carbon. We measure these emissions via the energy bills for our various offices and shops.
Scope 3 emissions
Scope 3 emissions encompass all the other indirect emissions that occur in a company’s value chain. This is the broadest category; it includes emissions from upstream activities like the production and transportation of raw materials, as well as downstream activities like the use and disposal of products. Scope 3 emissions also cover employee commuting, business travel, and waste generated in a company’s operations.
We divide the measurement of Scope 3 emissions into two categories: emissions due to products that we make to sell, and other carbon emissions generated through our business activities. As we are a company that sells millions of computers and accessories every year, our product emissions are especially important to understand.
Understanding carbon emissions from Raspberry Pi products
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a method for evaluating the environmental impact of a product throughout its life, from sourcing the materials used to make it through to disposing of it. We assess emissions for all our products across all of their LCA phases except for customer usage of the product. The diagram below shows the different phases in a product’s life cycle:
To assess the environmental impact of our products, we worked with our partner Inhabit to conduct a comprehensive study, following the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and ISO 14044:2006 standards. We used industry-leading tools from Inhabit together with the EcoInvent database to calculate the carbon footprint of products throughout their lifecycle. This involved carrying out a detailed analysis of a set of individual, representative products across our range, then applying the results to other, similar products.
Calculating individual product carbon emissions
How do we calculate the carbon emitted when a product is manufactured? In a nutshell, we first take every item in the product’s Bill of Materials (BOM) and find the carbon emitted during its production (called its embodied carbon), and add up all these emissions. We then take account of the carbon used to make the product in the factory as well as the carbon emitted during shipping (both shipping of the materials to make the product, and shipping of the finished product). Finally, we add on a number representing the carbon we expect will be emitted when the product is disposed of.
This may sound like a fairly simple step-by-step process, but finding the exact quantity of embodied carbon for every item of a product’s BOM is not easy – in most cases you can’t (yet) just ask a manufacturer what the embodied carbon is in their capacitor or diode or PCB or other widget. So how do we do it? The simple answer is averages: lots of them, in a database.
We map every item in a product’s BOM to a category in an officially recognised database which contains the average embedded carbon for many, many categories; there may be a category for the average small signal diode or capacitor, or for the production of steel plate, and so on. Often these figures are provided by mass – a certain quantity of carbon emitted per unit mass of the product – which means we need to know the mass of each component. Where there are no good matches for a particular item, we might need to look at that item’s own BOM, calculating the mass of the various materials in a connector, for example, and using yet more averages for the plastic, metals, and processes involved in order to estimate its embodied carbon.
For the carbon emitted in factory production, we can use real data provided by our contract manufacturer Sony, and for shipping we also have quite a lot of real data to hand. For product end-of-life, we have to turn to averages once more and add on the average carbon cost of disposal; again, these figures come from an officially recognised database.
As I explained above, we do these detailed calculations for a representative subset of our products, and then we scale the carbon footprint calculations proportionally for products with similar designs or varying sizes. We have also categorised certain items which sell in smaller quantities as “de minimis”: for these products, we have estimated their environmental impact by applying to them the average CO₂ emissions per dollar of revenue across our calculated products. This has allowed us to provide a comprehensive carbon footprint assessment for our entire product range.
Lastly, the total emissions per product are combined with our yearly sales number for each product to give us our final estimate of Scope 3 carbon emissions in the product category across our business.
Other Scope 3 emissions
I wrote earlier in this article that we divide Scope 3 carbon emissions into two categories: product emissions and other emissions. To calculate emissions for the other Scope 3 items, we take all the non-product transactions for the year from our accounting journals, and assign a category to each one. Then we can link this category to average emissions per pound spent; these average figures are drawn, once more, from the EcoInvent database. This allows us to convert the money we have spent with a business into a carbon emission figure.
Combining all of our Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions gives us a yearly emissions figure. For 2024, this will be reported in our inaugural annual report in April 2025.
Can we rely on the results? What do we do with them?
A good question to ask, given that our Scope 3 emissions calculations are based on a large sum of approximations, is how accurate – and therefore how useful – all this is. We’re using approved standards for these processes, and other businesses like ours will necessarily be calculating their emissions in a similar way; the averages method is the best currently available. It’s important to bear in mind that the results are an approximation, and this is a reason to work towards better data in the future, not a reason to be discouraged.
As well as carbon emitted today, our monitoring work allows us to get a stake in the ground and the infrastructure in place to measure carbon emitted in the future, steadily improving our accuracy over time. We are talking to our suppliers about providing product carbon emissions figures, and building these into our design cycle. By developing more accurate models and automated data collection and carbon calculation systems, over time we can both produce more accurate numbers and reduce our carbon footprint!
Understanding product carbon emissions means we can come up with innovative solutions to help reduce emissions, such as our recently launched Carbon Removal Credits. We are taking our first steps in a long and important journey: in future articles here, we’ll delve deeper into the various initiatives we are undertaking to minimise our environmental impact and build a more sustainable future for computing. Stay tuned to learn more about our efforts in responsible sourcing, energy efficiency, and waste reduction, and find out how you can contribute to a greener Raspberry Pi ecosystem.
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