Adopt Green Habits to Reduce your Digital Footprint

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Energy Sobriety is the most effective way to curb energy consumption in general. And luckily, it can be applied to digital usage: prevent depletion of raw material, hazardous e-waste, rebound effects and to make our existing equipments last longer...

Restraining our use of digital devices and technology whenever possible is key, yet very hard given our current world.

Here are some easy quick-wins to adopt low-carbon practices in your digital daily life:

  • Frequently clean your email box(es)
  • Unsubscribe from spam emails / useless newsletters & suscribe to an anti-spam program (like Spambrella)
  • Do not send heavy files, compress them or use online tools instead (like WeTransfer) to upload / share. WeTransfer automatically deletes files after 2 weeks.
  • Use tools such as Google Drive File Stream which only sync on your computer the files you work with. It massively reduces the volume of data exchange.
  • Send your emails to relevant persons only
  • Remove logos and high resolution design components in your signature for internal usage
  • Set low resolution logos for external emails
  • Clear your cloud stored data (images, videos, heavy files...). Keep only what is useful.
  • Only use cloud infrastructures when necessary, to prevent irrelevant data exchange. Store locally as much as possible (internal disk / portable external disk / USB keys).
  • Adopt green browsing habits: limit and optimize your search time spent on internet by registering frequent websites as "favorite", decreasing use of streaming....
  • Remove non used softwares to decrease license costs and increase equipments lifetime. Use a computer cleaner (like macclean)
  • Use Wifi instead of mobile data (4G) as often as possible (4G uses on average 4 to 8 times more energy than Wifi)
  • Reduce Videos usage to Wifi and disable autoplay
  • refrain from sending unnecessary videos & photos by email or social media
  • Set Podcast and Videos resolution to minimum quality
  • Do not always update minor softwares
  • Prefer modular solutions that allows users to choose specific targeted, useful stacks instead of vast softwares people will use not entirely. Frugality is crucial.

603 kg CO2e

footprint of your emails received per year, equivalent to around half of the entire yearly average individual carbon footprint in India.
(Carbon literacy)

1250 kg CO2e

is a mobile phone yearly GHG emissions based on a 1 hour per day usage.
(theguardian.com)

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Want to know more about our devices carbon footprint? Here are some interesting articles:
- the face
- science direct
- eco age
- eco bahn

Some MOOCs and reports:

- MOOC: MOOC for a sustainable IT by the ISIT Academy

- Documentary: Greening the Net by CNA Insider

- Report: Lean ICT Report by The Shift Project

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