Your digital emissions: Sources of your digital carbon footprint
We often think of carbon emissions in terms of transport or electricity use—but the digital world has its own environmental cost. Every file you upload, every Zoom call you take, every time someone loads your website — it all contributes to your digital carbon footprint.
And as modern professionals spend more time online than ever before, our web-based habits are now a silent but significant part of global emissions.
What are Digital Emissions?
Digital emissions are the carbon and energy outputs generated by your use of the internet, cloud services, hardware, and websites. From the devices we use to the servers powering our online tools, every click carries an environmental cost.
The good news? You can make a difference without radically overhauling your workflow. Here’s how.
Examples of digital emission sources:
In today's digital age, it's hard to escape the constant flux of electronic gadgets and social media platforms. While these tools make communication and access to information easier, we must also be aware of the digital emissions we leave behind. Here are some examples:
Office equipment such as computers & printers, monitors, phones and laptops
Office equipment can be a significant contributor to carbon emissions when mismanaged. Computers, printers, monitors, phones and laptops all need energy to operate. They also generate significant heat which requires cooling.
Whilst it is desirable to replace older equipment with newer, more energy-efficient models, this creates a double-edged sword as the obsoleted components end up destined to become e-waste — either in landfills, incinerators or recycling facilities which leads to the release of greenhouse gases and volatile organic compounds into the atmosphere from burning plastics or other hazardous materials that have been released from material degradation over time.
To reduce the resulting emissions, office equipment should always be switched off when not in use instead of leaving them on standby or idle. Regularly cleaning and maintaining computers such as removing dust internally reduces the computer fan usage and the extra power consumption required to cool the machine down, this also extends the longevity of the device. Replacing equipment with virtual solutions (e.g cloud computing) where possible to avoid needing to maintain and replace your own equipment.
Cloud infrastructure & storage
As more companies move to the cloud infrastructure, store files on cloud storage drives and adopt different cloud-based services to run their business, the demand increases the energy consumption required to operate and maintain their servers, their cooling systems and other equipment. Whilst many data centres are adopting practices such as the use of solar technology to mitigate their energy use, this isn't standard practice and depends on the company.
Inefficient code can also lead to higher power consumption as more resources are needed in order to process the code request.
Organisations using cloud services should look into ways to optimise their code to minimise their usage of resources. You can also optimise server utilisation by specifically using data centres closest to your country or the country of your primary market. Also opting to use data centres powered by renewable energy sources if available in order to reduce their carbon footprint from cloud services.
Website hosting services
Website hosting services are essential for online businesses to host their website or web-based applications, however these services also produce emissions through the electricity used to power the data centres that host the information.
Businesses should consider hosting their websites on green-certified servers powered with renewable energy sources such as solar or wind energy to decrease the website’s carbon footprint.
Website page load
Every time a website page is loaded, energy is required to send data over the internet and power the servers that host websites.
The amount of data transmission from loading a website page is growing as websites become increasingly more complex. Large multimedia content such as videos and images take up more bandwidth and require more energy to load. Complex code scripts that create special effects such as animations require significant energy input every time the page loads and runs the script for the design element to function. Inefficient code can also lead to higher power consumption as more resources are needed in order to process requests.
Reducing the use of these elements or optimising the code required to run them can help reduce power requirements by minimising data requests and reducing the number of bytes sent over the internet.
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