Resources
The research, the reports, the references.
The underlying work behind everything Interact publishes. Peer-reviewed papers, our annual reporting, the standards and policy documents we contribute to. For journalists, analysts, academic researchers and procurement evaluators who want to read the source.
Peer-reviewed research
The methodological backbone.
These papers are open access and available via the linked archives. Together they form the methodological backbone of the Interact dataset.
IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing · 2020
Optimizing Server Refresh Cycles: The Case for Circular Economy With an Aging Moore's Law
Measures the use-phase energy of remanufactured and refurbished servers against new hardware across configurations, factoring in a slowing Moore's law. Case studies weigh the economic and environmental impact of refreshing with refurbished kit.
Read on IEEE Computer Society →IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing · 2023
Is Hot IT a False Economy? An Analysis of Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency as Temperatures Rise
Tests the trend of running data centres hotter to cut cooling energy, using industry benchmarks and a wind tunnel to profile enterprise IT. Small rises in temperature or pressure can worsen server efficiency once the data centre is treated as one system.
Read on ResearchGate →Life Cycle Management Conference (LCM) · 2023
Limitations of linear GHG Protocol carbon reporting in achieving circular progress
Shows how the GHG Protocol treats linear and circular supply chains alike, creating a disincentive for circular economy practice, and calls for a standardised approach to circular carbon and environmental reporting.
Read on ResearchGate →International Journal of Environmental and Ecological Engineering · 2025
Understanding the Carbon Footprint of Storage Media: A Critical Review of Embodied Emissions in Hard Disk Drives
A critical analysis of the embodied carbon in hard disk and solid-state drives. Identifies gaps in current life-cycle assessments and proposes a framework, estimating an average of 13.3 kg CO₂ per drive.
Read on ResearchGate →European Journal of Business Management and Research · 2024
Data Explosion, Circular Solution: How Refurbished Drives Can Bridge the Storage Supply Gap
Sets storage demand against manufacturing capacity from 2020 to 2028 and quantifies the economic potential of reusing drives, identifying the metrics that build confidence in the secondary market.
Read on ResearchGate →European Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science · 2024
From Waste to Resource: How Standardized Health Metrics Can Accelerate the Circular Economy in Storage Media
Uses a large-scale erasure project of over 117,000 drives to identify the health attributes that determine whether a drive can be safely returned to service, informing industry standards for storage reuse.
Read on ResearchGate →Int. Conference on Automation and Computing (ICAC) · 2023
Maximising Server IT Energy Efficiency through Optimal Hardware and Software Configuration
Analyses how memory configuration and BIOS power profiles affect server energy efficiency across real-world benchmarks, highlighting quick wins and deeper gains from server profile customisation.
Read on ResearchGate →Conference paper · 2022
Balancing Power and Performance: A Multi-Generational Analysis of Enterprise Server BIOS Profiles
Profiles balanced against performance BIOS settings across a decade of server generations, concluding that at typical utilisation there is little reason to run maximum performance settings outside exceptional cases.
Read on ResearchGate →E3S Web of Conferences · 2022
Discussion of the triple bottom line benefits of server refurbishment
Outlines the social, environmental and cost benefits of server refurbishment for the data centre sector, and identifies the best use cases for refurbished components and remanufactured machines.
Read on ResearchGate →Reports
Annual and periodic reporting.
Annual and periodic reporting from Interact. Available as direct downloads or by request via the press team.
Annual report · 2023
Interact Global Goals Update 2023
Annual progress report against the three UN Sustainable Development Goals and six specific targets Interact committed to in 2022. Reports progress year on year and identifies the areas to focus on next.
Download PDF (2.4 MB) →Standards & policy
Contributions to industry standards.
Standards documents and policy work that Interact has contributed to as a named author or technical contributor.
Open Compute Project · 2026
Digital Twins for Data Centers
The OCP Digital Twin Initiative's white paper, establishing a shared industry definition and a maturity model for data-centre digital twins, with use cases across the lifecycle from design and commissioning to operations and circular hardware refresh. Interact's Stephen Clement is a lead author, alongside authors from NVIDIA, Cadence and Dassault Systèmes.
Published by the Open Compute Project under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.
Download the white paper (PDF) →Data Centre Alliance · 2022
DCA Sustainability Best Practice Whitepaper
The Data Centre Alliance's inaugural sustainability best practice document. Interact contributed to the IT efficiency and metrics sections, including the recommendation to report against ITEEsv and ITEUsv alongside the traditional PUE.
Available via the Data Centre Alliance. Contact the press team for a direct copy.
UK Government
Greening ICT Procurement Policy
The procurement framework under which significant portions of UK public-sector IT spend are evaluated. Interact's measurement aligns with its direction on IT efficiency and circular procurement.
Available via the UK Government Greening ICT programme.
On this site
Methodology references.
Long-form pieces on Interact's methodology. For procurement evaluators or technical readers who want to verify how the dataset is constructed and how the headline figures are derived.
- How we grade: the A+ to F scale underneath every analysis
- Why SERT? A first-principles test of the dataset foundation
- ITEEsv: definition, formula and calculation
- How machine learning helps measure server energy consumption
- What's in a server, and why we report it
- Beyond cooling: the data centre water footprint nobody measures
For copies of materials not directly downloadable here, or for any other resource enquiry, contact the press team via the Press page.