Digital represents 4% of the world’s emissions - more than the aviation industry - but websites and digital products are not solely responsible for this impact. Things like emails, sharing images and storing our files on the cloud all contribute to digital emissions. As individuals, we all have our own digital carbon footprint.
It’s made us think twice about how we use digital personally and for our partners.
manifesto’s Planet Squad are champions of balancing an organisation's goals with digital sustainability across all our practices. Here, Digital Marketing Strategist, Dominika Cechova shares some of her own personal experiences with digital sustainability, ways she’s managed to reduce her own carbon footprint as well as tips she’s recently learned from other members of the Planet Squad.
1. Limit your scroll time
When doomscrolling on Instagram, I rarely stop to think about how an extra 5 minutes affects the world around me. However, I learned about the carbon impact a minute of Instagram feed scrolling has - 1.549 gEqCO2 - so now it soothes me that the daily limits I set are not only good for me but also the wider world. If you have trouble keeping to self-imposed limits for apps most phones have digital wellbeing or Screen Time limit settings to help you switch off.
2. Cloud watching
There isn’t a hard consensus on the energy use of cloud storage, however independent academic studies put the figure between 3.1 kWh per gigabyte and 7 kWh per gigabyte. Stanford Magazine reports that 100 gigabytes of data in the cloud per year would result in a carbon footprint of about 0.2 tons of CO2, based on the usual U.S. electric mix. Storing files on your computer's hard drive consumes much less electricity and presents an opportunity for us to reduce our impact (and get organised too!)
This isn’t something I’ve implemented yet but when we discussed this recently, my Planet Squad pal Arjun shared how he’s managing Cloud Storage to minimise his impact:
“A few years ago I decided to go through all of the photos and videos I’d taken on my phone and back everything up on an external hard drive. It took a while, but I managed to delete a bunch of duplicates and blurry snaps whilst also discovering loads that I wouldn’t have otherwise looked at again.
All I need to do now is go through the latest additions to my camera roll every few months, moving the ones I want to keep to my hard drive whilst saving the best ones on my phone. I now have about 1,000 of my favourite photos and videos from the last 10 years or so stored on my phone and more on my hard drive, without any need for additional cloud storage. It helps the planet, saves me money each month and means my phone’s automatic ‘featured photos’ and ‘memories’ are always lovely!”
3. Greener browsing
Across manifesto we pledge to use Ecosia as our primary browser. Why? Ecosia is the greenest search engine on the planet, committed to using its profits to plant trees. So far 229,711,755 trees have been planted by the Ecosia community. (source: https://www.ecosia.org/)
4. Digital declutter
An email can create between 0.3g and 17g of CO2e carbon emissions to process and store depending on its length and content (e.g. images). I took some time to spring clean my inbox, unsubscribing from emails I no longer read, and deleting unread emails from my inbox. Other ways to be more mindful with email include keeping your content concise and only messaging people who need to see the message - your colleagues will appreciate this too.
5. Hang on to your hardware
I tend to get attached to people and places, but also things. I've had my personal laptop for 7 years and don’t plan on getting rid of it until it dies. The same applies for my smartphone. According to Deloitte, manufacturing accounts for the majority of a smartphone’s carbon footprint, so keeping it longer reduces its overall impact. As a company, manifesto works with a local company to repair our computers when there’s an issue. Just because you can (upgrade your hardware) doesn’t mean you should.
Julia, who works in client services at manifesto, has the following tips:
“As a parent of 3 children, two of whom are teenagers, we own a LOT of tech - more than I would like. Thankfully, our kids are also very climate aware, and will often help me look for secondhand bargains online when it comes to buying them phones, tablets or consoles. Their phones are from BackMarket and giffgaff, as are ours, and we source console games from places like Vinted or Ebay. And we always repair our devices and then recycle when they’re at end of life. We like to think that by making these small but informed choices, we’re doing our bit to conserve the planet’s resources - as well as saving money.”
At manifesto we help organisations like the University of Dundee, Blue Cross and Fauna and Flora with the sustainability of their digital estates. We do this through benchmarking and auditing website impact, identifying and acting on opportunities for improvement and embedding sustainability thinking into any new digital design and build. Interested to hear more? Email hello@manifesto.co.uk for a chat.