Grievance Redressal
Investor Relations
Become an Agent / POSP
Download App
hamburger
×
Digit General Insurance Logo
lang down-arrow

Select Preferred Language

×
phone icon
Powered By Digit
general-insurance
  1. Digit Insurance
  2. Insurance Guides
  3. What is Carbon Footprint
  4. Reduce Your Digital Carbon Footprint
close
Switch to Digit Insurance

7 Crore+ Customers

Affordable Premium

Check Premium Check Premium

How to Reduce Your Digital Carbon Footprint?

reducing your digital carbon footprint

The digital age has brought about ease and accessibility to millions of lives worldwide, while the growing improvements in technology have contributed to combating climate change. However, the use of technology and the internet comes with its own drawbacks.

Digital Carbon Footprint is the total carbon emissions released from digital devices and infrastructure, right from the manufacture and use to disposal. It is to say that everything you do with your electronic gadgets and the internet leaves a trail of carbon emissions which contributes to greenhouse gases.

To curb and reduce the amount of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere from digital technologies, there need to be strategies in place. One such concept is digital decarbonization.

What is Digital Decarbonization?

Modern technology and digital activities (as simple as sending a text) leave an impact on the environment. They also contribute to the growing carbon emissions in the atmosphere through energy consumption and the burning of fossil fuels. To decrease this impact, tech companies, organizations and individuals adopt a method known as Digital Decarbonization.

Here, sustainable procedures, energy efficiency and green practices are adopted at every stage of digital technologies – from manufacture, operations, storage to disposal. 

We can divide the carbon footprint of our digital activities into two categories:

  • The use of internet bandwidth, and
  • The production and use of digital devices.

Fortunately, you can adopt many adjustments to lessen your digital carbon footprint.

15 Ways You Can Reduce Your Digital Carbon Footprint

The following are easy, actionable tips that you can implement to reduce your digital carbon footprint:

Power Down

Disconnect your gadgets and engage in activities such as reading a book, taking a walk, or gardening. Disconnecting not only reduces energy load but also offers several mental, social and physical advantages.

Properly Dispose of Devices

Before tossing out products that still work, consider re-selling or donating them. Research places nearby where you can bring e-waste to be recycled. Some manufacturers and retailers also have electronics recycling programs for consumers.

Reduce Your Electronic Waste

Buying a new gadget to replace your old one is always tempting. However, a study by the University of Edinburgh found that extending your gadgets’ lifetime from 4 to 6 years could avoid the equivalent of 190kg of carbon emissions. Extending the overall lifetime of devices significantly decreases e-waste. 

Focus on Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency

We can stop using wireless chargers and unplug chargers after use, as they consume 50% more energy. Shut down electronic devices when not in use, especially at night. We can switch to renewable energy sources at home through light bulbs, refrigerators, etc.

Disable Autoplay Feature

Auto-play videos chew up a significant amount of bandwidth – meaning more energy consumption and higher emissions. You can disable auto-play videos by using built-in functions or downloading an extension for websites.

Implement Storage Efficiency and More Space

With time, the likelihood of reusing data decreases. After 90 days in storage, only 5% of data is actively used again. Online storage takes up space on servers that need power to run continuously. We can routinely check and clean our apps and files and reduce the sizes of our documents, photos, videos and other multimedia assets.

Declutter Your Emails and Inboxes

Effective use of email and communication tools is encouraged. To lessen your carbon footprint, you can unsubscribe from spam and ignored emails, clean out your mailbox regularly and compress email data. You can then move it to a cloud system that uses sustainable and green practices in their operations.

Adopt Green Web Hosting and Web Design

Green web hosting platforms power websites using renewable energy. They reduce the amount of energy consumed by data centres and can further offset the carbon footprint produced by your website. Adopting green web designs is a practice of optimizing a website to last longer, be more efficient, use less energy, load faster, have optimized file sizes, easy navigation, friendly UI and UX, etc. 

Lower Monitor Brightness

A Harvard study found that reducing your gadgets’ screen brightness from 100% to 70% can save your overall energy consumption by as much as 20%. Reducing brightness has the additional effect of minimizing eye strain, which many office workers commonly suffer from.

Download Instead of Streaming

Streaming platforms like Netflix are estimated to consume around 15% of the world’s total online bandwidth. You can save considerably on data (and energy) when downloading a file. For e.g., downloading a song to your device might allow you to listen to it indefinitely for just 5 MB of data – but streaming it 20 times will use 100 MB.

Using Audio Formats Over Videos

Videos take up a vast share of the digital carbon footprint, lot of data and energy to stream when compared to transmitting audio files. For e.g., it is reported that video conferencing on platforms like Zoom or Teams emits around 1kg of CO2 per session due to webcams being switched on.

Turn off Tracking and Surveillance

GPS and data tracking services consume enormous volumes of digital data, which also increase the risk of privacy and your carbon footprint online. You can minimize your digital carbon footprint and maintain control over your privacy by limiting your data tracking systems only wherever necessary.

Reduce Screen Energy

Encourage using power management features on your devices, such as screen savers, sleep mode and automatic shutdown to reduce energy while not in use. The length and frequency of screen time activities, such as online gaming, streaming videos and web surfing, impact how much energy devices use and the emissions from data centres.

Switch to Green Gadgets and Tools

Nowadays, you can minimize your carbon footprint with a variety of small green energy products, like off-grid systems and solar power bank chargers. Users can also transition to eco-friendly search engines and apps that help reduce carbon emissions.

Curb Online Shopping

Shopping platforms need tremendous amounts of energy to run their servers, and because one in three online purchases are returned, two billion kilograms of goods end up in landfills annually. The shipping business is carbon-intensive by nature. Reducing our internet buying would have a significant effect and support local companies.

How can Data Centres Reduce their Digital Carbon Footprint?

how can data centres reduce their digital carbon footprint

Reducing the energy consumption of data centres is an important step towards making digitalization more sustainable. 5 ways to do that are: 

  • Implementing Efficient Cooling Systems: One simple-sounding and popular solution is to locate data centres in cooler countries and blow the outside air into them. Warmed, piped water is another way to cool off high-performance computers, as is immersion cooling. Some companies are even working on using artificial intelligence to tune their cooling systems to match the weather and other fluctuating factors.
  • Re-using Waste Heat: Data centres produce heat throughout the year. Ideally, this heat should constantly be extracted and reused elsewhere. Many newer data centres use the waste heat within the data centre itself. However, a more comprehensive approach like district heating or recycling waste heat can also contribute to a city’s goal of sustainability.
  • Powering with Green Electricity: If data centres are ever to be operated in an environmentally friendly, carbon-neutral way, they will have to be powered by clean, renewable sources of energy. Some companies have started focusing more on sourcing their energy from wind or solar power or switching to LPG.
  • Power management: Utilize power management features and tools to optimise energy consumption during periods of low demand or inactivity. Implement dynamic voltage scaling, frequency scaling, and server power capping.
  • Energy monitoring and management: Deploy energy monitoring systems to track and analyse data centre energy usage. Use this information to identify inefficiencies and implement corrective measures. 

Which Social Media is the Worst for Climate Change?

Most of the population uses their phone primarily for social media. Whether it’s mindless scrolling on Instagram, TikTok, etc., watching hour-long videos, or streaming movies or shows, social media takes up a lot of energy.

According to the carbon emission tool for social media sites by Compare the Market, if you spend 30 minutes every day on 10 different social media platforms, your digital carbon footprint would look like:

Rank

Social Media Platform

CO2 Eq. per year

#1

TikTok

28,798g

#2

Reddit

27,156g

#3

Pinterest

14,235g

#4

Instagram

11,498g

#5

Snapchat

9,527g

#6

Facebook

8,651g

#7

LinkedIn

7,774g

#8

Twitter

6,570g

#9

Twitch

6,023g

#10

YouTube*

5,037g

*Note: Since YouTube tends to involve longer videos, it might have a higher cumulative emissions total.

From this data, we estimate that a total of 1,25,268g of COâ‚‚ Eq. is released into the atmosphere by a single user per year.

Daily, 5 minutes of 10 different social media platforms result in 20kg of carbon a year, the same as driving in a car for 52.5 miles. The 20kg figure is a low estimate for many people, especially since the average time spent on social media is 145 minutes daily.

Does Cryptocurrency Have a Digital Carbon Footprint?

Although the potential of cryptocurrency to challenge established financial systems has been commended, its effect on the environment is often disregarded. The emergence of digital currency has increased emissions from fossil fuels. 

To create new coins and verify transactions on the blockchain, a process called 'mining' is used, which requires powerful computers - meaning significant energy. It is believed that the energy usage of the Bitcoin network alone surpasses the whole of Argentina.

China and Russia, two nations with the biggest Bitcoin mining operations, mainly rely on coal-fired power plants to provide electricity. This indicates that fossil fuels account for a considerable portion of the energy necessary to run mining rigs. 

In fact, according to some estimates, coal may power as much as 70% of Bitcoin mining. This dependence on fossil fuels restricts attempts to switch to renewable energy sources.

The most promising approach, however, is to power mining rigs with renewable energy sources or mine operations using microgrids.

The responsibility of reducing digital carbon footprint is not just on an individual user or social media companies, but primarily on data centres and government agencies funding these projects. There are many sustainable strategies that organizations can implement to be more environmentally appealing.

The future of the environment is intertwined with technology and digitalization. It is up to us to make a difference.

FAQs About Reducing Digital Carbon Footprint