What is a digital carbon footprint?
Online seems more sustainable – as our need to travel diminishes and hard copies become all but obsolete – it intensifies our digital carbon footprint, and carries a huge environmental cost. So, what exactly is a digital carbon footprint and what are the impacts of this?
- A digital carbon footprint is the CO2 emissions resulting from the production, use and data transfer of digital devices and infrastructure and the technology industry is expected to produce around 14% of global emissions by 2040.
- Global email usage generates as much CO2 as having 7 million extra cars on the road.
- We could reduce emissions by 16,433 tonnes of CO2—the equivalent of 81,152 flights from London to Madrid—if every email user in the UK sent only one fewer email per day.
- There is a release of greenhouse gas emissions each time we use a search engine. Data transmission via the internet can be extremely polluting, accounting for 4% of our country’s greenhouse gas emissions. This is since the process uses a huge amount of energy and necessitates the deployment of millions of physical servers in data centres all over the world. Unfortunately, a substantial portion of the energy originates from sources that release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
- So, every time we use the internet or social media, a small amount of carbon is being emitted. While one single person’s usage only generates a small amount of carbon dioxide, the collective amount of carbon emissions of the world’s digital usage is monstrous.
- Watching online videos accounts for the biggest chunk of the world’s internet traffic – 60% – and generates a whopping 300m tonnes of carbon dioxide every year.
What is being done to combat this?
- Microsoft has also committed to becoming carbon negative by 2030 and will have offset all carbon emissions by 2050.
- Google’s drive has done the most to decarbonize its data and states that they are the “largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world.”
What can you do?
- 1 kg of CO2 is produced by video conferences every hour. Simply using audio instead of visual can cut carbon footprint by 96%.
- Unsubscribe from junk mail to reduce email emissions.
- Switch off your monitors when finished watching videos.
- Move data to the cloud – more efficient way to store.
- Dim your monitor. Dimming from 100% to 70% reduces the amount of energy used by 20%.
- According to research by the French think tank the Shift Project, streaming online material accounts for 58–60% of internet traffic and produces 300 million tonnes of CO2 annually, or around 1% of world emissions. To put things in perspective, one passenger’s typical emissions on a round-trip flight from Paris to New York equal one tonne of CO2. When playing movies, choose lower quality settings and disable auto-play options.
