Why Digital Clean Up?
In our digital age, clutter isn’t just physical; our virtual spaces are often overloaded too.
This digital clutter contributes to towards the astonishing fact that the carbon footprint of the internet is greater than that of aviation and shipping!
Digital clean up is all about trimming down the clutter we don’t need, cutting down the unnecessary carbon emissions.
Benefits of cleaning up your digital footprint
According to Digital Cleanup Day, there are 6 business benefits for cleaning up your digital footprints:
- Save money
- Raise efficiency
- Minimise security risks
- Educate employees
- Smaller digital footprint
- Positive brand image
Start your digital clean up today.
Roll the dice to choose which of our six easy actions you can get started with today.
You rolled a 1
Website Carbon Emissions – Hosting
From both a performance and environment point of view, not all website hosting is equal.
Choosing a hosting provider that runs on renewable energy is a great way to significantly cut the carbon emissions of your website. You can find out if your hosting provider is running on renewables using this free tool.
If it’s not, and you care about both performance and the environment, we’d recommend you check out our partner, Krystal.
Please note if you click the Krystal link above we may receive a small referral fee if you sign up to one of Krystal’s plans.
You rolled a 2
Power settings
Often when we receive our IT equipment, it comes pre-configured with factory or recommended settings. These are often designed to give the best possible fist impression, but not necessarily the most economical.
By taking a moment to review your power settings on your laptops, computer screens and mobile phones you could reduce your power consumption significantly, and therefore also reduce your carbon emissions.
How much of an impact?
Mobile phones: Switching your smartphone to dark mode can cut the amount of power your device consumes when lighting up your display by up to 30%. This means the device will go longer on a single charge, meaning you charge it less each day.
Computer screens: Setting your computer screen to 45%-55% brightness is suitable for most indoor use, and significantly reduces energy consumption.
As an example, reducing the brightness of an HD display from 95% to 40% is still
perfectly usable in an office and can reduce consumption by 10W per screen.
Which, assuming five, eight hours a day for 30 weeks a year could add up to a saving of 12kWh. Using the UK’s current grid intensity (from carbonintensity.org.uk) that could equate to saving 1.8 kg CO2e per screen.
You rolled a 3
Stored data
Did you know that most stored data is never used? The side-effect of that is that stored data often requires a certain amount of energy to maintain it, but also occupies disk space, meaning more disks are required. As with any other piece of technology, disks have both embodied and operational carbon footprint – and often the largest contributor is the embodied carbon emission (typically 80% of the total footprint).
Embodied carbon emissions are the emissions associated with building the ‘thing’, in this case a disk. So every new disk that required to store data that’s not needed, comes with another chunk of needless carbon emissions.
Simple action – Clean out junk photos: Nearly all of us are guilty of taking a few too many photos that we’ll never use. These photos hog up the storage in your smartphone (meaning you are more likely to want to buy a new one, which has it’s own embodied carbon footprint) but also in the cloud services (Google Photos, DropBox, iCloud etc).
Take a moment to clear out those blurry or duplicate photos, the screenshots you took of your proof of purchase/postage, or the photos you took of where you parked your car.
Once you’ve deleted them, make sure you also empty them from both the ‘bin’ on your smartphone and your backups in the cloud.
How much?
The Stanford Magazine suggests that storing 100 gigabytes of data in the cloud could be responsible for approximately 0.18 to 0.2 tonnes of CO2e per year. That’s just accounting for operational energy, so once you factor in the embodied (typically ~80%) it could be up to 1 tonne of CO2e per year.
100GB sounds like a lot, but it’s not really. Take a picture on a smartphone today and you’ll probably get an image of about 5MB. If it was just 5MB, you’d need 20,000 images to fill that 100GB. But it’s not just one copy of that image. In reality that image is stored on the smartphone, in the cloud and maybe in a back up or two – that’s potentially three to four copies of the same junk photo, quickly adding up.
We estimate that just by clearing out junk photos (blurry, screenshots, place-markers etc) an average user could typically save 25GB of storage in a year, resulting in a saving of 250kgs per year.
You rolled a 4
Video Streaming – meetings
We’ve all become accustom to video calls nowadays. Yet, the extra compression and data required to transmit high quality video content can add additional carbon overheads that might be unnecessary.
Quick action: When taking part in video calls, choose to use standard definition video (SD) instead of high-definition, turn down your monitor brightness, and when video isn’t adding value to the call (as is often the case when joining multi-party meetings) turn off video and rely on audio only – even if just for part of the meeting.
What impact will this have?
A one hour two-person video call could produce as much as 2.3 kg CO2e, compared to 90g if the call was purely audio. Find out more about this in our founder’s contributions to the Open University, here.
You rolled a 5
Emails
Every email sent carries a carbon footprint. Research suggest each email can generate between 4g and 26g of CO2e. While these may seem relatively small, they can soon balloon out of all proportion.
What causes email carbon emissions to balloon? Great question. The answer is relatively simple. There are three areas we can all address.
- Attachments to emails can increase email size from a few kilobytes to many megabytes. Just this week we received an email containing a 22MB file. This increased the emissions of that one email from 0.001g to 5.5g CO2e
- The reply-all function of email makes it very easy to accidentally multiply email emissions by orders of magnitude. Imagine the previous example being copied or reply-all’d to a list of 10 people; that’s increasing things to at least 55g. But in fact, it is likely even more when you considered the number of duplicates involved in managing email across different servers and devices.
- Email marketing is an incredibly valuable resource for businesses, but here we’re often dealing with thousands and thousands of emails in any one go.
What can you do?
- Avoid attachments. Upload your document to a shared drive or cloud service, and share the link. This doesn’t completely remove the footprint of the attachment but helps avoid unintended, unnecessary duplicates.
- Don’t reply-all. Don’t include people unnecessarily.
- Look for email marketing solutions that optimise email sizes and run on renewable energy. Our partner EcoSend is a great choice, find out more here.
Lastly, a very simple tip to help raise awareness in every email you send is to include something like this in the signature of your emails.
Please think of the environment when replying or forwarding this email. For lower carbon footprints use links to documents instead of attaching them to an email.
You rolled a 6
Website Carbon Emissions – Low Carbon Pages
Websites cause carbon emissions with every single page that’s viewed. While these are sometimes small, a website’s cumulative carbon footprint is a factor of the number of pages, the carbon emissions of those pages and the number of times those pages are viewed.
Digital Carbon Online offers an elegant and simple solution for assessing the carbon footprint of entire websites, and how they vary over time.
What’s the impact?
Some of the websites we monitor are causing tons of emissions every year. With the total number of active websites currently in the billions, we estimate the scale of impact caused by web page views is in the millions of tons of CO2e per year.
What can you do?
First of all, you need information. You can get this by installing Digital Carbon Online. Get started here.
Once you have that data, you’ll know where to focus your improvement efforts to reduce your carbon emissions. We maintain a collection of the latest tips and tricks here, for you.