Drop Some Of Your Carbon Footprint
WENVOE FORUM
Considering tomorrow today
Click and drop some of your carbon footprint
How many of us really think of the electronic data we store as part of our carbon footprint? Not many we suspect, until someone like us, points it out. We may be familiar with the idea that server farms, huge banks of computers, that are used for creating crypto currencies like Bitcoin; use lots of energy. But have you considered that all the data that Google, One Drive, Photobucket, Instagram, Facebook, etc etc etc “generously” save on our behalf, free of charge is using energy and therefore has a carbon footprint. If you generated the data it’s your carbon footprint!
Of course some of that carbon footprint replaces a much higher footprint represented by other non-electronic forms of data storage. For example, over its lifetime, the valuation report of 64 pages on a prospective house purchase surely generates, less greenhouse gas emissions as a digital version rather than printed out. However, here is where you might be able to do your bit to reduce global warming. If that report from 2015 is still stored in the cloud, it is still using energy and every day it sits there unused it is using energy. This is where you can help, delete it when you have finished with it.
According to Tom Jackson, Professor of Information and Knowledge Management, Loughborough University and Ian R. Hodgkinson Professor of Strategy, Loughborough University writing in The Conversation (theconversation.com) huge amounts of data is stored unnecessarily and energy is wasted contributing needlessly to greenhouse gas emissions. Jackson and Hodgkinson provided some staggering statistics.
More than half of the data collected and stored by firms is only used once
For a typical data based business, say insurance, of 100 employees they create 3 000 gigabytes of unwanted, but saved, data every working day.
Storing that data for one year has a carbon footprint equivalent to 6 flights from London to New York
Over a year, the never to be used again data that companies store has the carbon footprint of 3 million transatlantic flights.
Back in 2020 is was estimated that all digital data storage accounted for 4% of total greenhouse gas emissions and was growing rapidly
Unless action is taken, by 2025 and estimated 181 zettabytes (that’s 181 trillion gigabytes if it helps) of data will be stored; much of it unwanted and gobbling up energy unnecessarily.
Clearly as individuals we are small fry in the data stakes, however, as often, it’s a case of everyone needing to do a little bit which adds up to a lot. Let’s imagine you take 10 photographs of the family around the Christmas tree intending to send one to relatives in Australia with a Christmas message. Lunch is ready and rather than deciding which, you save them all to Photobucket to sort out and send later. It is likely that the majority of them become unwanted data as you never delete them. If you consider how many mobile phones there are you can see how if everyone takes a little care about what is happening to their data a chunk of global warming could be avoided.
We urge you to just stop and think about what you deliberately save to the cloud to your own Drop box space or Google drive or whatever you use. Go back and delete photos and files that you don’t want or better still select the version for long term storage as you save them and get rid of the others. Be mindful that some applications will keep a copy of your data even after you have deleted it, but that discussion is for another time.
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