Today, the digital world, and everything it involves, accounts for 4% of greenhouse gas emissions and the consumption of at least 7% of the world’s electricity, according to Greenpeace’s report.
Using the internet requires physical infrastructure – cabling, data centres and transmission networks – which needs electricity that will be more or less polluting, depending on the energy source that supplies it.
Streaming services – watching or listening to a file directly on a website without needing to download it to the computer beforehand – top the list of the most polluting platforms – one hour of Netflix emits 440 g of CO2 – but even a simple email also pollutes. The French Environment Agency stated in a study that a single 1MB email emits around 19 g of CO2, and if we attach a file to that email the pollution increases, and if we shop online, and if we send a WhatsApp message, and if we make a video call, and if we use other internet applications… it all keeps adding up.
Reducing this invisible and intangible impact doesn’t seem an easy task when it is part of our daily lives and when, for many of us, it was our salvation during the pandemic, helping us escape nostalgia, boredom and loneliness. As we said in our Blog’s previous post “Degrowth, living with less”, despite having a paralysed and locked-down planet, 2020 saw a new record-high CO2 concentration – 413 parts per million.
On the other hand, there is a depletion of the minerals needed for the batteries of these new technologies – lithium, manganese, cobalt, nickel. Demand is such that there aren’t enough reserves in the deposits that are currently exploitable or easily extractable – the low-hanging fruit. New deposits will undoubtedly be sought, but at what cost?
We can no longer keep burning fossil fuels linked to global warming, but nor can we continue with the same energy consumption, since there are not enough raw materials.
So, what can we do?
For now, to mitigate this digital pollution, rather than waiting and clicking for the necessary public policies to arrive, we should start with a few changes in habits, such as: extending the useful life of devices or new technologies, turning off the internet connection while you sleep, clearing devices of anything that isn’t essential (photos, old messages, videos), lowering the quality of the films we watch via streaming or giving them up altogether – hmm, tough one, right? – turning off the camera during video calls whenever possible, unsubscribing from unnecessary newsletters, compressing files sent by email and, if they are very large, using external platforms – such as WeTransfer – and, finally, never giving up reading paper books.
And you, how many emails did you send today? To be honest, I sent quite a few…
Source:
http://www.clickclean.org/
