By Sarah Griffiths6th March 2020

The internet allows us to send messages, share pictures, download music and stream videos at a touch of a button, but our online habits have a surprising impact on the environment.

It’s probable you’ve already replied to a couple of emails today, sent some chat messages and maybe performed a quick internet search. As the day wears on, you will doubtless spend even more time browsing online, uploading images, playing music and streaming video. Each of these activities you perform online comes with a small cost – a few grams of carbon dioxide are emitted due to the energy needed to run your devices and power the wireless networks you access. Less obvious, but perhaps even more energy intensive, are the data centres and vast servers needed to support the internet and store the content we access over it.

Although the energy needed for a single Internet search or email is small, approximately 54% of the global population now use the Internet. Those scraps of energy, and the associated greenhouse gases emitted with each online activity, can add up.

As an individual, simply upgrading our equipment less often is one way of cutting the carbon footprint of our digital technology. One study at the University of Edinburgh found that extending the time you use a single computer and monitors from four to six yearscould avoid the equivalent of 190kg of carbon emissions.

We can also alter the way we use our gadgets to cut our digital carbon footprints. One of the easiest ways is to switch the way we send messages.

By simply stopping unnecessary niceties such as “thank you” emails we could collectively save a lot of carbon emissions. If every adult in the UK sent one less “thank you” email, it could save about 16 thousand tonnes of carbon a year – the equivalent to taking 3,334 diesel cars off the road.

Swapping email attachments for links to documents and not sending messages to multiple recipients are another easy way to reduce our digital carbon footprints, as well as unsubscribing from mailing lists we no longer read.

“I unsubscribed from automatically generated newsletters, as when I learned about the carbon footprint from emails, I was horrified,” says Gaut. “Now, I’m careful not to send out my email to new websites… it’s made me consider the impact more.”

Choosing to send an SMS text message is the perhaps the most environmentally-friendly alternative as a way of staying in touch because each text generates just 0.014g of CO2e. Again this can depend on what you are sending – gifs, emojis and images have a greater footprint than plain text.

The carbon footprint of making a one-minute mobile phone call is a little higherthan sending a text, but making video calls over the internet is much higher: a five-hour meeting held over a video conferencing call between participants in different countries would produce between 4kg CO2e! But it is important to remember where it replaces travel to reach meetings, it can be far better for the environment.

So try to be responsible and sensible Internet users, behave as “green” as possible and perhaps together we will be able to help save our Earth for further generations))

By Sarah Griffiths6th March 2020

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think

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