Chapter 19 – Diving into Digital Carbon Footprint

Written by Matthew Denyer

Everything we do has a carbon footprint, and accessing the digital world is no exception.

Everything we do online, from scrolling social media, to writing emails, to buying delicious cans of wine, has an emissions factor. The culprits for these emissions are both the resources used to produce the equipment in the first instance, the energy needed to maintain power and charge equipment, and then the energy used by data centres to facilitate the hosting of websites, emails, images and the like. 

For many of us, the devices and apps used blur the lines between our professional and personal lives. So, while this blog focuses on our digital footprint at work, a lot of the themes naturally overlap as much of the information isn’t exclusively applicable to one or the other.  

As we’ve said before on this blog, we try and be mindful of environmental factors in every decision we make. Although, being mindful is not the same thing as cutting digital access altogether. I doubt it would surprise anyone to hear that Canned Wine Group is completely reliant on the internet for its day-to-day operations. And frankly, as individuals, we all are too. What we want to flag here is the impact this has on emissions and some simple ways we can mitigate this as best we can. Having a digital footprint is practically an essential part of modern life, what we’re aiming to do in this blog is highlight a few of our learnings to make some changes which will have a minimal impact on our access to the digital world, but make our engagement less carbon intensive. 

Number Crunching – The Stats Behind Digital Engagement

It’s very easy to forget that digital engagement has a carbon footprint, so here’s a selection of statistics pulled from Mike Berners-Lee’s brilliant book How Bad Are Bananas?

• A spam email picked up by your spam filters uses 0.03g CO₂e, whilst an email that takes 10 minutes to write and 3 minutes to read uses 17g CO₂e. Both these numbers will increase with the number of recipients. 
• A simple google search is 0.5g CO₂e, whereas a search and then five minutes looking through the results can be about 8.2g CO₂e.
• A video call on average efficiency laptop is 10g CO₂e per hour, but a desktop computer with a screen could be about 50g CO₂e. This is however a carbon saving compared to travelling on the vast majority of meetings. 

None of these are very big numbers by themselves, but how many spam emails are we all getting per day? These numbers can swiftly add up. According to OVO energy, if everyone in Great Britain sent one fewer email per day, the carbon saving would be equivalent to 81,152 flights to Madrid. 

As a company, every team member receives training on energy conservation and digital footprints as part of their onboarding. Below I’m going to share some lessons learned from this training alongside some further reflections and some ways I need to improve. 

Devices and Screens

They’re everywhere. Laptops, smartphones, monitors, tills, watches. They cost energy to run and to manufacture, and we all rely on them in our daily lives. The environmental impact of this is growing year on year. So how can we be better as individuals? 

For starters, increasing the lifespan of our devices is a great first step. The global supply chain involved in making electronics is carbon intensive and by limiting the number of items we need, that has an impact. Even better would be to consciously purchase products for their lifespan. For example, there are smartphones designed to be repaired, and not thrown away, like our fellow B Corp Fairphone. Once a part of the phone becomes damaged or dysfunctional due to age (like my battery just did) you can source a replacement part directly from Fairphone and replace solely that bit, instead of having to dispose of the entire device But, if you do have a device which can’t be repaired it is important to recycle it properly. Many local councils will take electronics alongside recycling collections (check your local council for details). If that isn’t an option for you then there are companies, like Reboxed for example, who will take your device, refurbish it for resale if possible, and recycle it if not. 

The settings on your phone can also have an impact. Do you need to have Wifi and/or data running constantly? Consider setting up a nighttime mode on your device which turns off your connections, limiting incoming notifications. It may be good for the planet and your mental health! Brightness is also a big factor across device types. Turning your brightness down to 70% can save up to 20% of the emissions of running that device.  

Also consider how many screens you actually need to be using at once. Dual monitors can be very helpful in a lot of situations, the take up amongst team members in the office varies. I often don’t to the dismay of my colleagues and I, facetiously, asked if I could write a blog as a rebuttal focusing on the emissions savings by my refusal to use my monitor the majority of the time, and here we are. For the record, according to https://www.digitalcarbonfootprint.eu/ my rough average of a half hour a day with my second screen is responsible for 22kg CO2e per year (including manufacturing emissions), whereas if I went full time with that monitor, that number would double. 

Online Engagement

There’s also the emissions factor around the content hosted online. Everything we see on our computers and screens exists in a place outside of these devices too, in big, energy consuming, data centres. Whilst the impact of each individual action online is small for most of us, as a collective they are adding up substantially. One of the most surprising facts from our Canned Wine Group onboarding is that a Channel 4 investigation by the program ‘Despatches’ found a single Instagram post by footballer Cristiano Ronaldo to his 240 million followers has the same carbon footprint as ten UK households over a year, and his following has increased by 2.5 times since that investigation was made. 

Some ways we can make a difference in how we use our device include disabling autoplay on videos on social media, so we are not using emissions viewing content we don’t wish to see. Also consider downloading content, such as TV shows or music, over Wi-Fi instead of streaming them on the move. This is more environmentally friendly, especially if it’s music you’re going to listen to multiple times. And you may thank yourself next time you’re on a train going through a tunnel. 

You can also consider lowering the video resolution on your phone. Personally, on a screen the size of a phone I can’t meaningfully see a difference between 720p and 1080p, so having my phone set to 720p lowers my emissions and makes downloading and streaming more seamless as there is less data used. It’s also very easy to get carried away with numbers of tabs open, both on phones and computers. Exiting tabs no longer in use helps cut down on data being used and may save you a headache when trying to find the tab you actually need. Speaking of finding things you need, also consider using bookmarks to get to pages you need regularly as the process of accessing a bookmark skips the step of using a search engine. 

You can also try and limit the number of newsletters you receive. Emails have a footprint, even if you don’t open them, so instead of letting unwanted emails sit in your inbox (or spam!) consider opening them up and hitting unsubscribe. This will also help cut down on your notifications going forward, making what lands in your inbox more meaningful for you. Even things you want to have received though, you should consider deleting once read. The storage has also a footprint. There will of course be emails you need saved, so consider setting up a folder for these that you won’t delete and try to keep your main inbox empty. This is something I wish I had implemented a long time ago. My personal inbox does not follow this advice and has major room for improvement. 

This is of course not an exhaustive list of ways we can improve but hopefully there’s enough ideas in here to offset the carbon emissions of posting this digitally. 

Any top tips feel free to drop us an email and let us know. We promise to delete it once read!