Have you ever stopped to think of the impact of your digital footprint, as an individual, a company, a country or the whole world? The idea of the internet and the “Cloud” always seemed airless, weightless and nearly magical. We have been told to not print our emails to save the trees, and keep everything in the cloud, to avoid losing any data that we produce. But what is the reality of this and how can we address and reduce our digital waste ?

What are we wasting exactly ?

It turns out that digital waste comes down to very material considerations, and is not just floating in the sky. Every bit of data we create online is actually stored on a server somewhere, which is physically kept in data centres. The issue with this is two-fold. Firstly, the impact on the land used to host these big buildings, and secondly the intense energy usage of data centres. Data centres directly influence our environment by adding to society’s “concrete footprint”, as they are usually built on large areas outside of cities which would have been greenfields. This takes away space for nature and humans, adds to the urban run-off, where water has nowhere to go in urban environments, they are ‘dead spaces’. Data centres are also very energy-intensive, needing a lot of electricity (or other energy forms) to cool down the servers that generate significant heat. Some commentators even argue that data centres globally have a similar carbon impact to aviation.

As is commonly the case in waste-related topics, a lot of discussions focus on how to change the tail-end of the waste production. In this case, how to have “green” data centres. There have been efforts made to reduce and otherwise mitigate the amount of energy used for data centres, or repurpose it. But this doesn’t consider the initial issue of the amount of data we produce, and how much is actually useful.

The concept of “dark data” relates to the single-use data that is generated by organisations and which takes up space in the servers. Individually, we are all aware of this- it is the thousands of old emails we never deleted, the newsletters we never read anymore, the different versions of an old work document that stays stored in our organisation’s archives server. It is the hundreds of similar camera phone pictures we took that we keep in the Cloud, thinking they have no impact because we don’t pay for storage. And corporations store even more data that is never used again.

What can we do about it?

Awareness is the first step. It is then important to look at our own impact and how we can influence this issue. We can take steps as individuals, and particularly as consumers, but we also need to hold organisations, work places, universities, schools ect to account by challenging them to look at this issue.

Some tips from a web developer :

• Emails
  • Switch to ecofriendly email providers, and ask your school / workplace to do the same
  • Delete old unused emails, and ask your school / workplace to have auto-delete procedures in place (most organisations have a seven year retention policy)
  • Download locally old emails that need to be kept for your records
  • Unsubscribe to any newsletters you do not need
• Other aspects of our digital footprint:
  • Delete your old online presence, such as accounts you are not using anymore. Just look up your name for that on a search engine.
  • You have the right to request companies to delete your personal data under the General Data Protection Regulation.
  • Compress your pictures and videos for online use. See below some useful links.
  • Streaming and storing online (clouds) uses up a lot of server space, so it is better to keep things locally and download anything you need. Good old DVDs and CDs are actually much greener than streaming services. Cork tip: most libraries have a great selection of DVDs and CDs that you can take out for free !
  • Use a more eco-friendly search engine e.g Lilo, Ecosia or DuckDuckGo
• If you are in web development/ ICT:
  • Switch your organisation to a more local/sustainable data centre and server (e.g. Infomaniak).
  • Compress pictures and files on websites.
  • Look up advice on ‘Green UX’, such as this Green UX checklist.

Note: this article focuses only on the digital waste, but the electronic waste generated from our electronic appliances (computers, phones,…) are also significant sources of waste and which use materials that also have a heavy impact on our environment. We will publish an article on this soon.

Some reading material:

• Gerry McGovern, ‘World Wide Waste: How digital is killing our planet and what we can do about it’ (2020)

Sources:

• https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electronic-waste-%28e-waste%29
• https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think
• https://theconversation.com/dark-data-is-killing-the-planet-we-need-digital-decarbonisation-190423
• https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/10/dark-data-is-killing-the-planet-we-need-digital-decarbonisation/
• https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/gerry-mcgovern-digital-pollution-e-waste

Header picture by Fili Santillán.