The digital transformation of education has rapidly evolved in recent years, driven by advancements in technology and further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital education Technologies (DETs) have become integral to higher education, reshaping how institutions deliver learning and manage resources. However, despite the widespread adoption of DETs, there has been limited focus on the sustainability of these technologies. This paper explores how sustainability considerations are integrated into DET selection processes at European Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) through semi-structured interviews with key decision-makers. The research focuses on three sustainability dimensions-environmental, social, and technological-and their impact on decision-making. The results indicate that while HEIs are making efforts toward sustainability, economic considerations still dominate the decision-making process. Moreover, the emphasis across sustainability dimensions remains unbalanced: social dimensions, such as privacy, are prioritized over environmental dimensions due to the former being treated as knockout criteria and due to a lack of reliable data on the environmental impacts of DETs. This study also identifies several challenges, including long procurement processes, limited financial resources, and heavy dependence on external service providers for digital infrastructure. The findings offer insights into how HEIs can better align their digital strategies with broader sustainability goals.

As higher education digitalises, institutions increasingly outsource the development and management of their digital infrastructure including server hardware and services such as email, shared storage, and video conferencing, to private companies. This outsourcing trend is a change in paradigm, since universities have historically been pioneers in deploying and maintaining their own digital infrastructure, a practice also known as self-hosting. Digital infrastructure has a key role in all of a university’s functions: administration, research, and education. While outsourcing infrastructure has benefits in the form of convenience and lower costs, it also erodes institutional independence, centralises points of failure, and dele- gates highly relevant value choices about privacy, data ownership and environmental impact to external actors. In this article, we provide a first quantification of a potential return to self-hosting, emphasising its effect in energy reduction and avoided e-waste. We then outline some policy actions that could enable higher education institutions to re-take control over their digital infrastructure by building local services. This mode of operation reduces waste, and has the added benefit of increased resilience to scenarios of resource scarcity and collapse of external infrastructure. As an example of what could be achieved leveraging these policies, we detail the architecture of a low-impact data centre made of upcycled hardware and resource-aware software. By exploring our main structural choices we aim to showcase how, even starting from a generally heavy-weight software stack such as Kubernetes, there is significant space to reduce digital infrastructure’s overall resource footprint.