As we can’t see it, it’s easy to think it’s not as big of a problem as it is. What harm can your Netflix binge really do? Well, “The non-profit organisation The Shift Project (PDF) looked at nearly 170 international studies on the environmental impact of digital technologies. According to the experts, their share of global CO2 emissions increased from 2.5 to 3.7 percent between 2013 and 2018. That means that our use of digital technologies now actually causes more CO2 emissions and has a bigger impact on global warming than the entire aviation industry!“[1]
That’s pretty scary isn’t it? Using the popular search engine Google, requires around 0.0003kWh of energy, which doesn’t seem like a lot. But times that by only 200 and you have the same amount of energy needed to iron a shirt. Its estimated that the average energy used by one person in one month by google searching is enough to power a 60kWh lightbulb for 3 hours.
You might be thinking, that still doesn’t sound like a lot? Well, maybe not on an individual level, but “according to the most commonly quoted statistics, Google alone receives around 3.8 million search queries a minute. All of those add up to an energy consumption that Google itself put at 5.7 terawatt hours – for 2015 alone. The annual energy consumption of the city of San Francisco is probably around the same.”[1]
10 Comments
Sophie Wentworth
This is amazing. I, like I’m sure many others do, try to think about my carbon footprint in terms of travel and energy use but how to reduce it digitally seems impossible. These are great suggestions, and fairly easy to adapt to as well. It always makes me smile when I see blog views coming from ecosia. It’s nice to know people are trying x
Sophie
theethicalevolution
Thank you, Yes I wanted to make it feel like an achievable task 🙂
Alena
Also – use black interfaces wherever possible 🙂
Thanks for an interesting post.
Jaya Avendel
I have never read anything like this before, so I loved reading this! I have always tried to keep my inbox empty, but cleaning out old files and duplicate images is a great idea to keep digital space empty! 🙂
theethicalevolution
Thank you 🙂
Sue Berk Koch
I had no idea that cleaning my mailbox was helping my carbon footprint. Interesting!
Thanks for your hard work researching.
theethicalevolution
It’s not something we tend to ever think about!
Charity
These are all such great ways to reduce your carbon footprint! I need to implement these ideas too. And also, thanks for explaining what exactly a carbon footprint is. This was so informative for me!
Julie
This is such a useful post! I’ve learned a lot. Thank you! Going to delete emails now. 🙂
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