Earlier this year, Aguaro took part in a webinar hosted by CRiP - a French a trusted network of IT decision-makers - alongside U Tech, one of our clients. The session brought together IT leaders to discuss a topic that is quickly becoming central to IT strategy: measuring and managing the carbon footprint of information systems.

Following the webinar, U Tech shared its experience in an French-only interview with CRiP. The discussion provides a clear, practical perspective on how organisations can move from fragmented data to structured carbon management, and from measurement to actionable decision-making.

This translated interview offers useful insight into the challenges faced by IT teams, as well as the approaches being put in place to build credible, long-term low-carbon trajectories. To learn more and discover in detail how U Tech is structuring and steering its low-carbon IT strategy with Aguaro, watch their testimonial on our website.

Rémi Ollivier is Transformation Programme Director at U TECH. In his feedback dated 27 January 2026, he describes the rollout of a Sustainable IT program at a leading retail group, and explains how formalising the carbon footprint helped set a new direction and define actions to reduce the IT carbon footprint of Coopérative U.

What role does U-Tech play for Coopérative U?

U TECH is the IT department of Coopérative U, a French generalist food retail group bringing together the ‘Hyper U’, ‘Super U’, ‘U Express’ and ‘Utile’ brands. Today, U TECH manages digital services for more than 80,000 employees.

Compared with other sectors, in retail digital extends far beyond servers, workstations or smartphones. It also includes all equipment deployed across our 1,900 stores. This notably covers checkouts, each comprising around ten devices: screens, barcode scanners, scales and the PC that manages transactions.

In our warehouses, we also operate equipment used for mechanisation, as well as all mobile terminals used by staff to manage stock, parcels and deliveries.

In terms of IT hardware, we manage just over 400,000 devices across stores, warehouses and central sites, in addition to our two data centres. In total, U TECH oversees 33,000 workstations, 25,000 mobile devices, 4,500 servers, 20,000 printers and 700 applications.

When did your Sustainable IT initiatives begin?

Following a maturity assessment carried out in 2021, we truly structured our approach from 2022 onwards around six workstreams, one of which focused on carbon accounting. Initially, we deployed measurement tools and put in place the first building blocks of eco-design.

How did you initiate your carbon assessment?

As we were not carbon accounting specialists ourselves, we looked for a partner with proven experience who could support us on this journey. We quickly identified Aguaro, a French company offering both an off-the-shelf software solution and expertise gained from supporting other organisations engaged in CSR or Responsible Digital initiatives. With Aguaro, U TECH benefited from established know-how and a tested methodology.

We aimed to be as comprehensive as possible, in order to produce a carbon footprint as close to reality as we could.

Given the volume and diversity of our equipment, it would have been impractical to do this manually by calculating the footprint of each asset. Aguaro’s tool relies on our CMDB (managed in ServiceNow), which enabled us to automate a large share of data collection and the measurement of our hardware footprint. The amount of data entered manually, such as services, licences or cloud usage, was ultimately very limited.

Beyond collecting figures, Aguaro helped us understand what they mean and identify the main contributing factors.

What did you learn from this first carbon assessment?

This first assessment confirmed that digital equipment linked to checkouts represents the largest share of our carbon footprint, accounting for 36%.

Checkout systems are followed by our server environment (21%), and then our end-user environment (17%).

This carbon footprint was calculated both on a flow basis, in line with SBTi (Science Based Targets initiative) recommendations, and on an amortised basis, as this is much easier when explaining changes in our footprint to employees, the U TECH Executive Committee and Coopérative U.

With these figures, we can now clearly explain to both staff and leadership that checkout, server and end-user environments alone account for nearly three quarters of our IT carbon footprint. At the same time, somewhat counterintuitively, our data centres weigh less than we had expected in terms of carbon impact.

Across the Coopérative as a whole, digital accounts for less than 1% of total emissions. However, Coopérative U is committed to engaging all entities and stores in this effort. The IT department is therefore fully involved in reducing the overall carbon footprint.

What targets have you set?

In 2023, the Cooperative committed to reducing its carbon footprint across all activities. We decided to model three carbon trajectories to 2030, using our 2021 baseline.

The first trajectory follows SBTi recommendations, which would lead to a 25% reduction in our footprint by 2030 compared with 2021.

The second, referred to as the “natural” trajectory [long-term trend, editor’s note], reflects what our footprint would look like in 2030 if no specific action were taken. This scenario results in an increase of around 25% compared with our 2021 baseline.

The third trajectory is an improved version of the “natural” scenario, incorporating reduction measures. This would reduce emissions by around 15% compared with the natural trajectory, despite our growth targets in terms of store numbers (2,100 by 2030, a 25% increase compared with 2021) and therefore a significant rise in in-store digital equipment, which remains the largest contributor to our carbon footprint.

To build these three trajectories, we ran numerous workshops with different teams, including workplace, networks, procurement and financial management, to identify actions for each scope and project the evolution of the digital carbon footprint through to 2030.

We then consolidated the proposals from these workshops to define concrete actions, such as extending server lifecycles, delaying the replacement of Wi-Fi access points in stores, increasing the share of refurbished equipment in procurement, and implementing eco-design practices.

This reduction trajectory is not fully aligned with SBTi. However, when looking at the number of stores and carbon intensity per store, we still achieve a reduction of 2 tonnes of CO₂ per store between 2021 and 2030.

These are the targets we have communicated to employees, leadership and the Coopérative in order to bring all of U TECH on board with this Responsible Digital approach.

Where do you stand after two years?

With this third trajectory, we now have a shared reference point that helps guide decision-making. However, despite the actions already taken, the reality is that our carbon footprint is growing faster than initially anticipated under the reduction scenario.

For example, we have extended server lifecycles by two years, increased the lifespan of Wi-Fi access points, and encouraged employees not to replace their workstations after the usual four and a half years.

We have also engaged both employees and suppliers in eco-design initiatives. In November 2025, we brought together around twenty of our key suppliers to discuss not only our Responsible Digital ambitions, but also how they could contribute and support us in reducing our carbon footprint.

This reduction approach provides legitimacy and clear decision criteria within U TECH and Coopérative U when selecting equipment, while also giving visibility to the actions we are able to commit to.

Whether in terms of trajectory or measurement, we remain in a continuous improvement process to refine the gaps observed between projections and operational reality.