What is the concept behind the world's first eco-label for sustainable and transparent software?

Increased demands on software often lead to unnecessarily high hardware energy consumption and premature hardware replacement. This is a huge environmental problem, as the annual amount of electronic waste is increasing worldwide. In 2020, each EU citizen generated an average of around 10.5 kilograms of e-waste per capita (https://www.destatis.de/Europa/DE/Thema/Umwelt-Energie/Elektroschrott.html).

Furthermore, ata-intensive formats and ever-increasing volumes of data are placing an unnecessary burden on transmission networks and creating considerable storage requirements in data centers. The software-related obsolescence of hardware is very often a consequence of inefficient software, which is largely responsible for the huge amounts of electronic waste being generated in the first place.

To optimize software and make it more sustainable, the first step is to create transparency about energy and resource consumption. The German Environment Agency has addressed this issue, among other things, by developing and introducing the Blue Angel for software in 2021/2022, where for the first time the energy and resource consumption of software could be made visible in a physical measurement laboratory.

The Blue Angel is an independent, governmental, and multi-criteria eco-label and, in addition to the transparency of energy and resource consumption, also includes criteria such as backward compatibility and user autonomy. In some cases, for example, the guarantee of security updates, but also the documentation of interfaces, and the disclosure of data formats are required. These criteria are intended to extend the hardware service life of the devices. The Blue Angel concept therefore demands the greatest possible transparency of software. To reduce the huge quantities of electronic waste, software must be made more sustainable and efficient in the future.

This presentation will introduce the Blue Angel and its criteria for software as well as the current expansion of its scope to include mobile apps and client-server software. It will show how such an eco-label can be used to raise awareness in the software community about the problems of energy and resource consumption of software. Open-source software, which is based on the disclosure and reuse of programming code, can be an important driver for the development of sustainable software. In the long term, the Blue Angel should encourage developers to program sustainable software using green coding methods, for example, and to change the software landscape in the direction of sustainable software.