Your Digital Carbon Footprint (Yes, that’s actually a thing)
We’re all aware of the environmental impact of our day-to-day activities and many of us take steps to reduce or manage it as best we can (recycling, electricity consumption, avoiding excessive plastic or waste, etc.). However, many people may not be aware of their ‘digital carbon footprint’, the carbon impact that comes from our use of technology as amassed by the building and maintaining of networking infrastructures (huge amounts of electricity, the construction of server farms, and the continual expansion of our wifi and broadband networks).
While you may assume that the environmental impact of, for example, a single email must be virtually - no pun intended - negligible (actually amounting to between 0.03g and 26g of carbon dioxide), when considering that we collectively send or receive over 300bn emails every day, the majority of which are useless spam, this adds up to an impact of approximately 9,000 tonnes of daily carbon.
With that in mind, reducing the spam or unnecessary emails that your business sends or receives actually has a direct and potentially significant impact on your digital carbon footprint.
It can be difficult to keep on top of the various ways in which we’re all aiming to be environmentally conscious, but a reduction of spam and unnecessary emails has the added benefit of being more sustainable and less inefficient with your time and internal resources.
See below for some tips to reduce your digital carbon footprint:
Improve the effectiveness of your email system’s ability to detect and filter out spam emails,
Consider changing your energy provider to a renewable source (e.g. solar, wind, etc),
Reduce the size of content sent in emails (such as imagery), and have a condensed email signature (removing your company logo, etc.) for subsequent email replies and conversations (or avoid overly elaborate signatures altogether),
Actively manage the mailing lists that you are signed up to,
Prevent email conversations from getting too lengthy by starting new email chains,
Provide cloud links to attachments instead of directly sending larger presentations or PDFs (remember, each additional person you send an attachment to doubles the carbon footprint),
Consider removing any ‘green comments’ in your email signature (such as "Save the environment, don't print this email!"), which ironically increase the size, and therefore digital carbon footprint, of every email sent.
Do you have any additional recommendations on how to reduce your digital carbon footprint? Get in touch to share your thoughts.
