Choose Your Path.

Five lessons, four ideas — one for each lesson except this recap:

• Lesson 1 — Planned obsolescence is structural. Devices fail sooner than they could because they are designed to. The Phoebus cartel set the template in 1924; the Loi Hamon (2015) and the EU Right to Repair Directive (2024/1799, in force July 2026) are the regulatory pushback.

• Lesson 2 — Moore's Law has slowed. Dennard scaling broke around 2005; single-thread CPU performance has only quadrupled in 20 years (versus 20× in the previous 10). A 2018 laptop is not meaningfully outclassed by a 2026 model for everyday work. The CPU is rarely the bottleneck — battery, storage, RAM and software bloat are.

• Lesson 3 — Manufacturing dominates the carbon footprint. ~80 % of a laptop's lifetime CO₂ is paid before the box is unpacked. Extending a device's service life is roughly two orders of magnitude more impactful than any in-use optimisation.

• Lesson 4 — The 4 R's are a hierarchy, in order. Reuse > Repair > Refurbish > Recycle. EU Directive 2008/98/EC formalised this exact order. The 65 % rule decides between repair and replacement; the lifecycle math decides between new and refurbished.

If you have absorbed those four ideas, you have the foundation. The two specialisation paths apply them to specific contexts.

The Foundations cover the common ground of Green IT. The two specialisation paths apply that common ground to specific decision-making contexts. You can take either or both, in any order. The choice depends on which decisions you actually face in everyday life.

Most people pick one. Many pick both — the lessons reinforce each other, and the overlap is small (each path has its own dedicated content). All three certificates draw their Foundation questions from the same shared pool of 12+ questions, so the basics remain part of every test.

Each path has 4–5 lessons and a final assessment leading to a separate certificate.

Before moving to the specialisations, take the Foundations certificate exam. It is the simplest of the three: 10 questions, ~15 minutes, 75 % to pass. All questions are drawn from the same Foundations pool you have implicitly seen across the four content lessons.

The exam is stateless — no account, no tracking. If you pass, you will be invited to enter your name and download a personalised PDF certificate with a verification code. If you don't pass on the first try, you can retake it immediately; questions are drawn at random each time, so the practice value compounds.

The Private Devices and Professional Devices certificates also draw 5 of their questions from the same Foundations pool. This is deliberate: the foundation matters regardless of which specialisation you take, and you are likely to see overlapping questions across certificates if you take more than one.

After you have your Foundations certificate, choose one of the two specialisation paths and work through it. Each builds directly on the four ideas above. The Private path is shorter (~30 min) and the Professional path is longer (~35 min) because professional decisions involve more moving parts — procurement, contracts, fleet logistics, compliance, reporting.

There is no "correct" order. If you decide for your household and also have IT-team decisions at work, take both. The Private path will feel more concrete (specific retailers in Luxembourg, the 65 % rule with real prices); the Professional path will feel more strategic (procurement clauses, KPI design, CSRD).

When you have completed all three certificates, you will have demonstrated the practical knowledge of a Green IT Ambassador across both individual and organisational contexts. That is the goal of this hub.