Businesses across the AV industry - from manufacturers and vendors to integrators and end users - are considering sustainability and the environmental impact of their work. In doing so however, there are key challenges we’re all facing and without overcoming them, we won’t see any meaningful long-term change.
We asked brands in the AV industry who are doing their bit to limit the environmental impact of their work what they think the most important challenges are. And ultimately what can we do to overcome those challenges to improve the environmental impact of the AV industry? This is what some of the sustainable technology brands in AV are doing and how it’s impacting their users.
Making a commercial case
Potentially the most significant challenge that many in the industry need to address is the costs associated with doing more for the environment. There are many solutions and technologies which boast lower energy consumption and as a result reduced operational costs. But often this can have a higher initial cost. And if capex and opex sit in different camps, it’ll likely be a harder ‘sell’ to get hold of any new piece of kit that promises less of an environmental impact.
It’s important to look at capex and opex as a whole, and really weigh up how impactful ongoing expenditure can have in spite of the upfront costs. We asked our vendor partners if they had any hard proof that this can have a significant impact and the team at Sony shared how their tech helped a client actually save money.
Christopher Mullins, Head of Product Marketing at Sony Professional Displays & Solutions told us; “Octopus Energy, one of the UK's fastest-growing clean-energy providers, recently rolled out more than 400 BRAVIA Professional Displays across its offices as part of its commitment to environmentally responsible workplaces. They saved £90,000 per year in energy costs by using Pro BRAVIA displays and centralised power scheduling.”
Clearly the appetite for more energy efficient technology will increase as similar results are reported by end users like Octopus. So it’s important for vendors to be building operational efficiency into their technology. So when the time is right, operators can reap the benefits.
We asked for more examples of where tech can be more efficient and Sofie Trovik, Huddly’s Head of Sustainability shared this about their solutions. “An important aspect of energy efficiency in our solutions is our use of on-device AI. AI-driven functionality is at the core of most of our user-friendly features, but all processing takes place locally on the device rather than in external data centres.
This avoids the additional, often unaccounted-for energy consumption associated with cloud-based processing, ensuring that the direct energy footprint of the AI is contained within the device itself.”
With technology manufacturers like these offering solutions that demonstrate better operational and environmental efficiency, it’s clear that there’s more buy-in on sustainability from the tech end of the industry. How do we inspire that kind of buy-in further down the pipeline?
Taking accountability
Whether it’s in technology development or project delivery, what makes adopting more sustainable practices more difficult is the lack of accountability. Or at the very least a lack of understanding over who should take accountability.
We’ve already seen that manufacturers are designing and building their technologies with more environmentally-friendly processes. Barco was another whose solutions have sustainability built into their design with Peter Delagaye, Field Marketing Manager EMEA North for Barco telling us that “ClickShare uses 100% non-paint plastic parts , uses halogen-free PCBs where possible, and incorporates recycled materials. 100% of the ClickShare portfolio contains PCR (post-consumer resin) plastics.”
There isn't, however, one single, universal way of measuring the environmental output. Barco’s Peter Delagaye spoke about how they measure the sustainability of their products: “Full lifecycle assessments (LCA) are used to understand and reduce impact; for example, for ClickShare Bar, 59% of the carbon footprint comes from production and 41% from usage and end-of-life, which is an unusually low usage-phase share in AV, reflecting the focus on energy efficiency (including automatic standby behavior).
The question is though - is it the vendors’ responsibility to demonstrate that they’re more sustainable products? Or is it the responsibility of the end users to use the products more sustainably? It’s easy for each stakeholder in the AV pipeline to ‘pass the buck’ to the next.
Huddly’s Sofie Trovik talked about where questions of sustainability come in as part of the procurement process. She said that “decision-makers recommending products are not always incentivised or required to prioritise sustainability. In addition, widely recognised certifications such as EPEAT and TCO Certified are still not broadly applicable across many AV product categories, making it harder to benchmark and compare environmental performance.”
You can see initiatives from different organisations across the AV industry, including from the European Commission who’s spearheading a CO2 impact calculator. It says that the project will “deliver a common calculation methodology and a user-friendly web application designed for calculating the CO2 impact of AV productions. The tool will calculate and monitor CO2 footprints, as well as exchange and compare data among existing calculators. Results will be fed into policymaking at European level, contributing to the ongoing greening efforts within the audiovisual sector.”
What this or other initiatives don’t do is mandate anything for operators across the industry. Until that’s done, we’ll continue seeing the responsibility for more environmentally-friendly operations moving up and down the supply chain.
Performance v efficiency
Should the challenges noted above be magically overcome with immediate effect, the third challenge that our vendor partners noted as significant was questions from end users was whether more efficiently-operating technologies would deliver the same level of performance.
And without beating around the bush - the answer is yes they do. Otherwise vendors wouldn’t make them available to the market. The more important question is how we keep those technologies delivering the highest level of performance over a longer period of time so end users get better return on their initial investment, which has a huge impact on a product’s overall contribution to more sustainable operations.
Lightware has an approach, which CEO Craig Storey explained to us. They said its “modular hardware designs allow individual I/O or processing modules to be replaced or added instead of replacing entire systems, which significantly extends service life and reduces waste. Regular firmware and software updates add new features and improve interoperability, keeping devices useful for years beyond their initial deployment. Designing for field repair with replaceable power supplies, fans, and I/O boards makes onsite refurbishment practical and reduces the number of units sent to disposal. Staged migrations to networked AV (AV-over-IP / SDVoE) let organizations retain displays, cabling, and some endpoints while upgrading only encoders/decoders or gateways, avoiding full rip-and-replace projects. Standardizing packaging sizes and using recyclable or reusable protective inserts improves the recyclability and reuse of packing materials.”
It’s this extending of a product’s lifecycle which can have the biggest impact. Any new technology install should be future-proofed through the vendors which make up the workflow. Huddly’s approach to this is significant, as described by Sofie Trovik: “We place strong emphasis on extending product lifetimes through upgradable software and modular hardware. We continue to deliver meaningful software updates for products launched up to seven years ago.
User needs and use cases evolve over time—most notably during the COVID-19 pandemic, which significantly changed how videoconferencing systems are used. Through software updates, we have been able to add new functionality to older products, allowing customers to keep using existing hardware rather than replacing it.”
Are we doing enough?
The age-old question for anyone who’s considering sustainability, and how they approach becoming more environmentally conscious is whether what we’re doing is enough. The reality is that, no. As an industry there is always more than we can do because there arguably isn’t a limit to what would be considered ‘enough’.
But by thinking about the expenditure you’re happy to undertake, how you’ll keep yourself accountable, and planning to keep your workflow operating for as long as possible, operators and technology suppliers can make a good start to reducing their impact on the environment.