This paper examines the ways in which companies collaborate with green influencers on TikTok in order to combine sustainable communication with product sponsorship. TikTok, with its highly visual and meme-based communication style, offers companies a channel to align their marketing strategies with green messaging. Green influencers play a central role in this dynamic, blending activism and promotional content to raise awareness about sustainability while endorsing products. However, the actual willingness of these narratives to challenge the capitalist neoliberal logic has been questioned in the literature.

A content and thematic analysis of 45 TikTok videos was conducted to see how companies express their environmental commitment through the affordances offered by the platform, including visual and viral aspects. Indeed, the aim of the paper is to explore the main actors, central themes and recurring narratives in these collaborations.

The findings reveal that companies from diverse sectors integrate product sponsorship into educational narratives that inform users about environmental issues while positioning the sponsored product as a solution. This approach aligns with the storytelling styles of green influencers, potentially enhancing the credibility of their content. However, there is a predominant focus on individual behavioural changes with limited emphasis on collective action or broader societal responses to sustainability challenges. This reflects a tension that simultaneously critiques unsustainable practices while remaining rooted in neoliberal consumer logics. As a result, these collaborations may promote sustainable consumption but fail to address the social dimensions of sustainability, restricting the potential for fostering a more comprehensive approach to environmental advocacy.

As our societies become increasingly mediated by digital technologies and more essential services and life opportunities move online, it is vital to acknowledge that digital inequalities are still a key issue in the UK. Digital inclusion encompasses more than just access to the devices and data necessary to go online in the first place, including the need for the digital skills, motivation, and understanding to use the internet safely and confidently. However, this first step – i.e. access to devices and data - is still a barrier to inclusion for many. Digital exclusion is intertwined with social and economic inequalities and affordability of devices and data is a key issue, especially in the current cost-of-living crisis. Concern is also growing amid the parallel climate crisis about e-waste and the environmental costs of linear models of consumption of devices, connectivity and digital technologies. Device donation and reuse programmes have the potential to address both the goal of reducing e-waste and of addressing digital inequalities, and there is opportunity in the public sector to achieve these goals both via policy and via leading by example through taking part in such programmes.

This paper presents key findings from a project which, based on a series of interviews with key UK public sector organisations, explored the motivations, enablers, and barriers experienced in determining whether to adopt a more circular approach in how they manage their IT estate, and how this can help them to play their part in improving the lives of digitally excluded people.

The digitalisation of social relations has been precipitated by the mass collection, creation and storage of data through bulking physical infrastructure known as data centres. Data centres and their expansion are as much a certainty in the public imagination as the growth of grass. However, these centres, often obfuscated in their existence by the very terminology used to describe and naturalise their positionality and function, such as “silicon forest”, expose critical fault lines in the localities burdened by their resource-intensive nature, such as post-colonial Ireland. Their very existence in these localities poses the question of what utility they provide, how much of the data within these centres actually serves a daily function, and how much is simply sitting dormant, never to be retrieved again. In conversation with critical discard studies, critical data studies and with a decolonial lens, this research will conceptualise “Data Landfills” as the inevitable consequence of the era of systematic datafication. This paper aims to open a modern-day black box by interpreting and classifying the wasteful industrial practices behind the data that resides within the data centre nexus of post-colonial Ireland and its contemporary developmental landscape. In doing so, this paper challenges the logic of growth that underlies data centre expansion in the face of an unfolding climate and biodiversity crisis. Data landfills provides an alternative framing of data centres’ purported function, re-contextualising our understanding of the utility of data centres by uniquely positioning their data-driven processes in the realm of pollution and waste economies.