The artificial intelligence boom and the resulting increase in data center power consumption has thrust sustainability into the minds of technology professionals everywhere. Not only is generative AI itself forcing data centers to use more electricity, there’s also an urgent need to properly cool those overworked data centers without threatening the planet’s water supply.

Fortunately, efforts are already underway to reduce generative AI’s footprint. Things like small language models consume significantly fewer resources than their more well-known counterparts, large language models, and efforts to more efficiently cool data centers can help as well.

But sustainability doesn’t start and end with data centers. Product packaging has long been dominated by plastics, including single-use plastics, that can take hundreds of years to decompose. Even the process of plastic recycling is less environmentally friendly than it was once thought to be.

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