We all do it! But, if we think of it at all, we tend to think that taking photos with our phone and sharing them online, whether by WhatsApp, emails or social media, has a negligible environmental impact. Certainly compared to heating your home, driving your car, buying fruit imported from the tropics or taking a flight or a cruise, right? Sorry to disillusion you but that’s not the case at all!
The cloud is not some fluffy, nebulous entity. It’s rack after rack of whirring, heat-generating, energy-sucking servers (computer hard drives) requiring cooling in a range of interconnected data centres, with no guarantee they are powered by renewable energy.
Even reading this article has a carbon footprint. According to the BBC, who report that your internet habits are probably not as clean as you think,
The carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet and the systems supporting them account for about 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions, according to some estimates. It is similar to the amount produced by the airline industry globally
“our annual email usage generates up to 40 kilograms of CO2, which equates to driving around 200 kilometers in a small petrol car” – Mike Berners-Lee “There is also around 6 times as much spam sent each day than genuine email, with email as a whole only around 1% of all internet traffic”
“By contrast, video streaming accounts for over 80% of all internet traffic, with this figure almost certain to grow over the next few years”
So what are the most impactful things we do online?
- Streaming video (including short videos and ‘reels’ on social media)
- Video and audio calls (Zoom, WhatsApp, FaceTime) etc.
- Uploading, downloading and sharing/sending images (photos)
- Spending time with your device switched on or in standby mode
You will be glad to hear that plain text messages and emails are fairly low impact, unless of course you are replying to many (especially when its low importance and not all recipients really need to receive a notification and power up their device to read your message) and group chats (e.g. WhatsApp) – especially larger groups.
Next you will find a list of small steps you can take to reduce your personal impact – every little helps!
What we can all do to minimise our online carbon footprint
Have an appreciation of file sizes: 1 GB = 1,000 MB = 1,000,000 KB
Plain text <100 KB ; photo 1-20 MB; video 10 MB – 20 GB
Local hard drives (internal or external) are least impactful but not as convenient as cloud file sharing solutions such as Google Drive, OneDrive, DropBox etc.
Cloud storage for video (like YouTube and Vimeo) or for photos (such as Google Photos, Flickr etc.) also has the advantage that they compress larger files but there is an impact each time you access your content.
Turn off Live photos on your iPhone and avoid saving photo bursts just pick the best image and delete the rest – you’ll thank yourself (and so will others) when it comes to looking through your albums!
Don’t send attachments in emails or messages, especially when sending to many, instead share links from cloud sharing solutions (see above). This also applies to sending images or videos via text, WhatsApp or other messaging services.
On the same theme, don’t send screenshots – they are dreadfully wasteful. Either copy and paste if it’s text or send a link to the web page. Crop photos and trim videos before sending.
Set automatic deletions especially for older files and email (the Sweep function in Outlook is a game changer).
Set WhatsApp to ‘disappearing messages‘ (who needs that photo of next door’s cat from 3 months ago?) and regularly delete media from group chats
Close down unused tabs in your web browser as reloading them when you return to your device uses unnecessary energy.
Track down space-wasting documents – unimportant old files will often be stored without much thought of whether they will be needed again. This may be directly on your PC or mobile device, on a shared server, in cloud storage, or within your email or other messaging apps storage.
Think twice about whether to store or delete files, emails, or other messages. Regularly clear your download folders by filing items that need to be kept and deleting those which don’t. This is particularly important with larger files like images and videos, but also consider smaller data files that are no longer needed – such as software update files, meeting agendas etc.
Finally, make sure to turn-off and fully shut down your devices – not just standby – regularly (Friday afternoon before Shabbat is a great time for this!) and allow them to install operating system updates. This will help [you and] your device function as efficiently as possible.