Microsoft has published its annual sustainability report, looking at its progress on the effort in 2021. The report looks at how Microsoft is moving closer to becoming a carbon negative, zero waste company by 2030. In addition, a separate post from the Xbox team also looks at how Xbox is looking to stay green heading and deliver on Microsoft’s goals.
Generally speaking, Microsoft says that it has seen an overall reduction in scope 1 and scope 2 emissions of about 17% year over year. This is through purchasing of renewable energy. Meanwhile, scope 3 emissions went up 23% year over year.
For those unfamiliar, scope 3 emissions are hard to control. It includes the materials in Microsoft buildings, the business travel of its employees, and the full life cycle of its products, including the electricity customers may consume. As for scope 1, and scope 2, those are direct carbon emissions, and indirect emissions like exhaust, and the things that come from energy production. Microsoft explained this in a separate post from 2020.
Microsoft is hoping to reduce scope 3 emissions by accelerating work to set business-group-specific annual carbon intensity targets. Also in the plan is restructuring and increasing Microsoft’s internal carbon fee to better match the underlying cost of carbon abatement.
As for what’s in the plans for Xbox, there’s a lot in the docket. Microsoft is planning to design Xbox products and accessories to be 100% recyclable by 2030. This builds on the fact that Microsoft switched to using post-consumer recycled resins on Xbox Series S consoles. Elsewhere, Microsoft is also allowing system and game updates to be downloaded while an Xbox is in Energy Saver mode.
Other plans include the fact that Microsoft has embedded an enhanced power monitoring system in a small subset of consoles. This is for anonymous, telemetry collection. Basically, this helps Microsoft identify the best opportunities to introduce future improvements to help save power. You can learn more about these changes over on the Xbox Wire.
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