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Five Ways to Reduce The Environmental Cost of Your Digital Life

By crooky | February 18, 2008

As I’ve said in previous postings, I’m all about comprehensive cost accounting when looking at greenhouse gas emissions. Put another way, I don’t believe that you can measure the emissions of something without measuring the missions that were created when that something was created. Smelting metal, electricity used to run the machines that build something, energy used to refine fuel, etc… A very interesting article about Gmail caught my attention late last week. The article, if you haven’t read it, essentially says that when you store every e-mail you ever sent or received on Gmail’s servers, you’re using up electricity somewhere to power those servers. That electricity has a carbon footprint. Common sense dictates that you should therefore delete any e-mails from your gmail account that you don’t absolutely need to keep, right?

Well, Google is a pretty respobsible corporate citizen overall and is actively looking for ways to reduce its carbon footprint. What can us lowly humans do to reduce the carbon footprint of our digital lifestyle? The following list identifies ways that each of us can reduce our impact on the environment:

1. Reduce your eWaste

This is really two points: drop the gadget fetishism that sees you buying a new laptop/phone every 18 months AND when you do have to get rid of a piece of electronics that is truly dead, don’t throw it in the garbage. Most major cell phone providers offer cell recycling programs. Best Buy will recycle small electronics (not computers) and batteries on your behalf. There are lots of non-profits that will accept your old computer for parts (or, if it’s working, to put into schools for the kids to use). Just look around and try to find somewhere to send your old electronics instead of trashing them.

Also, put off buying that new PC until the old one is well and truly dead. Use an external hard drive to back up periodically. You should be doing that anyhow. That way, when your computer goes down, you don’t lose anything.

Click here to read my own report on eWaste (yes, it’s a term paper from grad school).

2. Delete all unneccesary files hosted on the web

Your Flikr account, your gmail account, your online file storage - go through them and cull some of the crap. I know that some would-be trendsetters are predicting that everyone will soon post every detail of your life every moment of every day through YouTube, Flikr, Twitter, Facebook, Annoyatron (I made that last one up and yes, it’s already registered).

3. Shut everything down when you’re not using it.

You probably already know this one but electronic appliances running on “sleep” mode or just with the screen turned off continue to draw power. Yes, they draw less power but they still draw power. Unplug your laptop from the wall when you’re not using it and it’s fully charged. Have all of your printers, etc.. hooked up to one power bar and turn it completely off when you’re not using it.

4. Only buy a computer that meets your needs

Some people - especially gamers - are keen to have the biggest, baddest GPUs and CPUs they can get for their PCs. The problem with these PCs is that they are power hogs. You can tell by the amount of waste heat they generate. Hot computers are computers that suck a lot of power down. High performance PCs need a ton of fans just to keep the PC cool enough to use. Unless you’re using your PC as a digital video bay or a high-end gaming machine, it’s unlikely that anything more than an entry-level computer is necessary these days.

5. Buy carbon offset certificates

David Suzuki Foundation has a great article on how to select carbon offset certificates. Essentially, what you’re doing is buying stock in a project that reduces GHG emissions to offset your own emissions. We used to buy that at BC Hydro to offset our own electricity usage.

So, that’s my take on “greening” your digital lifestyle. I’d love to hear more suggestions. What can/have you done to reduce your environmental impact?

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

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Topics: Policy, Technology |

2 Responses to “Five Ways to Reduce The Environmental Cost of Your Digital Life”

  1. A greener search engine Says:
    February 19th, 2008 at 3:31 pm

    Someone created a greener Google GUI too:
    http://www.blackle.com

  2. crooky Says:
    February 20th, 2008 at 10:33 am

    hey “greener search engine”. I actually looked into Blackle while writing this post and intentionally left it off the list. The figures for Blackle’s energy savings claims are suspect. They’re based on EPA numbers for CRTs and do not apply to LCDs. With LCDs now representing the bulk of new monitor sales and with CRTs representing a rapidly declining market share overall, the energy savings claims of Blackle are, at best, hugely overstated. In some cases, LCDs use more power to display black than white - potentially putting Blackle on the wrong side of the equation.

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