5 Ways Online Casinos Can Reduce Their Carbon Footprint
With the global focus on environmental sustainability and carbon footprint reduction gaining momentum in the past few years, online casinos are seen as the poster child for sustainable gambling. From introducing paperless lottery tickets to allowing people to gamble from anywhere, they have significantly helped combat the global carbon footprint.
Nonetheless, online casinos also contribute to environmental pollution both directly and indirectly. For instance, live dealer games require physical studios to operate smoothly, leading to relatively high energy consumption and waste generation. Besides, developing online casino software and hardware systems requires energy to run.
This write-up reviews how online casino operators can combat their carbon emissions in the online gambling landscape and beyond.
1. Cloud-Based Systems
Online casinos require storage and data processing infrastructure to enhance display, determine game outcomes, and provide a secure gambling environment. Typically, they have data centres with supercomputers and complex server systems, all relying on energy to run, contributing to environmental pollution.
However, online casino operators can switch their operations to cloud-based systems with energy-efficient infrastructure to help them consolidate their server infrastructures. This can help them cut down on data processing and storage demands, minimising the vast amount of energy needed for their operations.
2. Efficiency in Hardware and Software Infrastructure
In the case of live dealer casinos, immense hardware and software systems are required to ensure players can access them from anywhere using digital devices. As such, operators can efficiently optimise software and hardware systems to ensure they work together to minimise energy wastage.
For instance, server virtualisation can help optimise the utilisation of computing resources by reducing the number of physical servers. The more densely virtualized the networking, computing, and storage infrastructure is, the less power and energy live dealer casinos will require for their operations.
3. Renewable Energy and Resource Management
Gaming companies can use renewable energy, such as solar and wind, to reduce their digital carbon footprint when manufacturing gaming equipment.
In the case of software developers, they can optimise codes to offer faster and lighter apps without compromising on quality. They can use CO2 calculators to measure the carbon footprint of different gambling websites to help them adjust accordingly.
Software developers can also double down on resource management when creating gaming software. For instance, they can optimise memory usage, reduce network bandwidth, and reduce the number of software updates and downloads.
4. Digital Documentation
For years, paper usage has been among the significant contributors to climate change. This has led to industries requiring paper for their operations, including the casino industry, to develop solutions to reduce paper usage. For instance, conventional lottery sites pretty much rely on paper to distribute lottery tickets.
However, by adopting paperless lottery tickets, the lottery landscape has significantly reduced the global carbon footprint. They minimise the amount of paper produced by paper industries as well as the energy used in printing.
Furthermore, much of online casinos’ documentation happens online. Players verify their identity online instead of visiting land-based establishments to do so.
5. Supporting Sustainability Initiatives
Online casino operators can support sustainability initiatives in many ways. For instance, they can create awareness about new initiatives such as responsible AI, which advocates for the development and use of artificial intelligence systems in a transparent, fair, and ethical manner. The legal framework of responsible AI can help assess how online gambling sites address challenges stemming from AI to ensure they are of greater good to players and society.
They can also address the link between ethical gaming and sustainability, including self-exclusion systems and betting restrictions to combat carbon footprint.
Besides, AI can help monitor energy consumption within data centres for optimization. Predictive AI can analyse historical data on energy used for various operations in the online casino landscape. The findings can be used to monitor resources for future allocations.
Final Word
While the environmental impacts of operating an online casino may not be of major concern, looking for solutions to reduce their carbon footprint still makes a difference. Besides, online casinos rely on other industries, such as manufacturing, for their operations.
Therefore, addressing the sustainability issues around the larger online gambling industry can significantly reduce the global carbon footprint. Overall, the online casino industry is among the sectors that have played a role in promoting environmental sustainability, and it doesn’t seem like it will stop any time soon!
