After reading this article, you will most probably reconsider doing the following things:
- hitting Reply All button in your email
- keep subscribing for endless marketing emails
- store thousands of pictures in your photo gallery on a phone
- meaninglessly scrolling Instagram
- maybe even reading my blog whatsoever
If I ask you how much CO2 emissions your phone produces, the answer could be easy – emissions from manufacturing, transportation, utilization in the best-case scenario. I will undoubtedly expand on these in future posts. Still, today, I would like to talk about emissions produced from using your phone as technology – taking photos, watching Netflix, chatting on WhatsApp, having Zoom meetings, even reading this very article.
With technology improving and energy use is getting more efficient, the world population with access to the Internet and the amount of bandwidth required is increasing rapidly. Some basic estimates on Internet contribution to global emissions are around 3.7%. To put this into more context, 3.7% is exactly the emissions from the whole airline industry globally. Some recent estimates claim that 30 minutes of video streaming emits up to 80g of CO2. Let’s again put it into some perspective – it would add 14kg of CO2 to the atmosphere every time you watch the entire Friends sitcom on Netflix.
So how big is the carbon footprint of the internet? It includes CO2 emissions from emails, searches, and cloud storage. We are over 4 billion people on the planet, active internet users, and global IT sector electricity demand ranks behind only two countries in the world – China and the US.
The Internet uses a tremendous amount of energy, and this is due to two key factors:
- Manufacturing and shipping
- Powering and cooling
Technology producing companies must manufacture and ship the Internet’s hardware, including computers, smartphones, servers. Computers and smartphones must be powered and cooled, drawing electricity from local grids. The power is generated in different ways with varying elements – coal, natural gas, nuclear, renewables. Some estimates show that one hour of streaming a videoconference may emit between 150 and 1000g of CO2, depending on the service. That hour also requires from 2 to 12 liters of water to cool the systems within servers and a land area about the size of an iPad Mini. According to recent studies, the global carbon footprint could have grown by 34.3 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions by the end of 2021 due to continuous remote work set up across the world. I will give you another scale – to fully offset these emissions, our planet needs a forest twice the size of Portugal. The water footprint would be enough to fill more than 300,00 Olympic-sized swimming pools, and the land footprint would be roughly equal to the size of Los Angeles.
Social media, music, email, streaming video, and commerce are increasingly moving online. That means a lot of new data to store. And depending on the company, the energy created to store that data isn’t always green. The amount of data we use has increased in the last few years. For example, Internet traffic has tripled from 2015 until 2021. Despite this rising demand for data, Information and communication technology’s (ICT) electricity consumption stays nearly flat, as increased efficiencies counter increased internet traffic and data loads. But those easy wins could end within a decade. Things are not that simple as Internet users in different countries will have a disproportionately large footprint. Improvements in energy efficiency, economies of scale, and the use of renewable energy will doubtlessly reduce this. However, it is also clear that people in developed nations still account for most of the Internet’s carbon footprint.
The average website produces 1.76g of CO2 per page view. An email has an estimated carbon footprint of 4g of CO2, and a large attachment could have a footprint of 50g. A typical year of incoming email for a business user – including sending, filtering, and reading – creates a carbon footprint of around 135kg. Live video streaming is growing at 19% each year. Netflix and Youtube combined represent more than 50% of Internet traffic at peak times in North America. Pornography accounts for a third of video streaming traffic, generating as much carbon dioxide as Belgium in a year. Furthermore, some YouTube views are unintentional as some watchers use YouTube as background noise, sometimes even fall asleep, generating carbon for no gain.
Streaming video and audio are the biggest drivers of explosive data growth, making up 63% of global internet traffic. That generates 300 million tonnes of CO2 a year, roughly 1% of global emissions. This is because energy is consumed by the servers and networks that distribute the content, topping up the power used by devices.
Online gaming is another cluster of consuming energy. The carbon footprint of playing multiple games like Fortnite is not too bad as they are designed to be responsive, so they do not require too much data traffic. For example, a player gets a character’s position on a map or someone’s shooting, but it doesn’t take too much data to communicate that. However, updating games is more carbon-intensive. Flagship games like Fortnite or Call of Duty require lots of updates – gigabytes every couple of weeks for downloads, which add new features.
Data centers worldwide today consume around 1% of global electricity use. The Asia and Pacific region is home to the most cloud data centers, with the US and Canada not far behind – having roughly 100 and 80 data centers accordingly in 2021. Europe had 58, and Latin America had 10.
Many IT sector companies have taken significant steps to green their cloud. Many major brands have committed to 100% renewable energy, including Facebook, Apple, Etsy, Salesforce, Google, Adobe, HP, Box, Rackspace Technology. Apple already uses 100% renewable energy and has committed to being 100% carbon neutral for its supply chain and products by 2030. Microsoft committed to becoming carbon negative by 2030, reducing its carbon emissions by more than half by 2030, and offsetting all historical emissions by 2050. Facebook has committed to net zero emissions across its value chain in 2030 and has already been using 100% renewable energy since 2020. Demand for data centers and network services is expected to continue to grow strongly, but energy use will continue to be primarily determined by the pace of energy efficiency gains.
How to reduce your internet carbon footprint? I will give you some tips on improving your daily habits by only slightly changing your behavior. I’m sure that many things I am about to mention you will not even notice changing.
Watch your video streaming. Turn off auto-play and avoid using videos when you only need audio. Close tabs you are not using to prevent videos from playing in the background.
Change your email habits. The best way, of course, is to talk in person rather than over email, but if sending an email is absolutely necessary, then limit “reply all.” We could collectively save many carbon emissions by simply stopping unnecessary niceties such as “thank you” emails. You can also unsubscribe from newsletters you’re no longer interested in. This can limit your subscription to airlines companies, for instance, – you’ll know about their sales through different channels for sure as they will target you on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms.
Swapping email attachments for links to documents is another healthy habit of reducing your CO2 emissions. Choosing to send an SMS text message is perhaps the most environmentally-friendly alternative as a way of staying in touch because each text generates just 0.014g of CO2. A tweet is estimated to have a footprint of 0.2g of CO2 while sending a message via a private messaging app such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger is slightly less carbon-intensive than sending an email. Again, this can depend on what you are sending – gifs, emojis, and images have a more significant footprint than plain text.
Choose a conscious cloud. Consider storing your data on a green cloud provider, as some providers run entirely on renewable energy sources.
Kill the vampire power. When plugged in but powered down, computers continue to draw energy, known as vampire power. 1/4 of all residential energy consumption is used on devices in idle power mode.
Take a snooze or shut down. Power down your computer if you’ll be away from them for more than 2 hours. Even in sleep mode, computers continue to burn energy. The average laptop burns 50-100 W/hour of electricity while in use and 1/3 of that in standby mode. Set your computer to go into sleep mode after a certain amount of minutes so it can run more efficiently while you’re away for shorter periods.
Dim your monitor. Dimming from 100% to 70% can save up to 20% of the energy the monitor uses. Plus, lowering brightness reduces eye strain.
Use a tablet or smartphone. For quick searches and non-work-related tasks, use a tablet or smartphone instead of a laptop or desktop.
Hold onto your IT equipment for as long as possible. Get it repaired before you buy a new device, don’t follow trends of changing your smartphone every season just for changing.
Go directly to the website rather than using a search engine. Save websites you regularly visit in favorites or bookmarks. However, Internet searching is another tricky area. Today, Google uses a mixture of renewable energy and carbon offsetting to reduce the carbon footprint of its operations. According to Google’s figures, an average user of its services – someone who performs 25 searches a day, watches 60 minutes of YouTube, has a Gmail account, and accesses some of its services – produces less than 8g of CO2 a day. Regardless of the search engine you choose, using the web to find information is more sustainable, of course, than browsing in books. A paperback’s carbon footprint is around 1 kg CO2, while weekend newspaper accounts for between 0.3kg and 4.1kg of CO2, making reading the news online more environmentally friendly than poring over a paper.
A few words about crypto. Those who have been tempted by cryptocurrencies might also want to think carefully about the environmental impact of the transactions they conduct. Vast amounts of computing power are needed for the algorithm used to validate transactions on Blockchain’s distributed ledger system. One recent study estimated that BitCoin alone is responsible for around 22 million tonnes of CO2 emissions every year – more significant than all the carbon footprint of the whole of Jordan. Even knowing all this, I will not advise you to go and perform money transactions in cash.
Small steps matter. Everyone can improve some of their daily habits, while giant corporations take massive steps towards improving efficiency. As we have learned, most servers are already run on renewables, and companies are going even greener and committing to decrease their carbon footprint significantly. I believe that some of the following links can be interesting to check out for further exploration on this topic.