“Better-than-green” tech

\n2023/02/07 (editted: 08/08/23)\n

\nWhat is “green” technology? Is it anywhere near being actually\nsustainable? Here’s how we strive to do better than “green” and truly\npioneer sustainable tech business and social change.\n

Warning: This article gets technical!

“Green” tech

First of all, no tech is green. Some unfortunate truths of the world\nwe live are that most raw materials are unsustainably extracted from\nforeign lands, labour is usually paid the bare minimum and even if your\nenergy supplier is “green”, the wider economy in which you both operate\nis not.

As a technophile I am obviously not going to campaign for the\nabandonment of all tech but it is important to realise that, at present,\nwe are currently building on borrowed time. This is a big part of the\nmotivation behind Shineponics!

Cloud

Now, accepting that we can only make “better” decisions, let’s\nexplore some of the decisions made at Shineponics. First of all,\nShineponics uses Deno Deploy for cloud infrastructure. Deno Deploy is\nthe commercial cloud infrastructure built around the Deno JavaScript\nengine. Both the Deno engine and the JavaScript language itself are\nopen-source technologies, wahoo!

Deno Deploy supports many standardised web platform APIs and\nencourages their use, this is another step towards community ownership\nthat I greatly appreciate and it reduces vendor lock-in, a tactic used\nby organisations like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft. Deno Deploy also uses\nGoogle Cloud Platform under-the-hood, which in 2021 powered its\ndatacenters with 61% renewable energy, a step in the right\ndirection.

Data

Another hot topic in the tech world is data protection. Platforms\nlike Facebook and Google capitalised off of user data for far too long\nbefore regulation started to come into play. Most users still don’t have\nan understanding of what they are giving away when signing up to\nplatforms and telling them to read pages of “terms and conditions” is\nsimply not an ethical solution.

Shineponics understands what Ben Parker meant when he said “with\ngreat power, comes great responsibility”. As developers of communal\ntechnology we have a responsibility to protect the users that allow us\nto do what we love. You may notice that you have not clicked a cookie\nnotice on this site. Why? Because we do not use cookies! We do\nanonymously track things like request times, rough geographic area,\npreferred language etc as a means to improve our services but we don’t\npretend we need your personal information to do that.

We also build our platforms to support user-owned data first and\ncloud-stored data second. A Shineponics application will only store data\nlocally within your browser by default, giving you complete control of\nwhat we know about you. Want to clear the data? Just clear the browser\nstorage. If you want to persist your data on the cloud and share it\nacross multiple devices you can, but that is done at your\ndiscretion.

Energy

A secondary benefit to our local-data-first approach is that our\nsoftware uses less energy than other similar software because we simply\ninteract with less stuff. Without as many database read and writes we\ntransmit less. On top of this we run all of our web applications on the\nserverless edge with Deno Deploy. This means we never maintain unused\nserver infrastructure, we spin up code when its needed and let it die\nwhen its not. Hooray for energy efficient cloud services!

Hardware

Shineponics hardware is a work in progress. We are currently\nexperimenting with ESP8266 boards and peripherals as they appear to be\nthe best community-backed and open-source solution for low-cost IoT\ndevices. However there is much more to investigate here. We also can’t\navoid the fact that the raw materials used in hardware boards are likely\nnot sustainably sourced. This will therefore continue to be “non-green”\nuntil locally-produced hardware is available. This may not be possible\nyet but is certainly on the roadmap. I hope for now that the decisions\nmade in developing our software provide assurance that our hardware\nchoices will be made with as much consideration towards our communities\nand the environment as possible.

Stay tuned for the next steps in our “better” direction. Goodbye for\nnow!