Digital damage: Is your online life polluting the planet?

The environmental impact of our digital lives is surprisingly high and can be mitigated by choosing digital meetings, shopping and even exercise classes over their in-person alternatives.

"We don't think about the various infrastructures required to do simple things like send an email or hold our photos, which are stored in data centers that are often out of sight, out of mind."

She says that if we think about it, we usually expect these services to be continuous and that there isn't really a limit on those digital practices.

Digital activity has a high environmental impact according to the author of a book on the subject.

Along with the greenhouse gas emissions from substantial energy use by our personal computers, data centers and communication equipment, this impact also includes the water use and land impact from mining, building and distributing the metals and other materials.

Digital activities have high impact.

Many researchers attempt to calculate the individual carbon footprints of various technologies, and they often focus on the energy used by server, home wi-fi and computers and even a tiny share of the carbon emissions to construct data center buildings.

There are some greenhouse-gassiest digital activities.

• Video calls: Just one hour of videoconferencing can emit up to 1 kg of CO₂, require up to 12 liters of water and demand a land area adding up to approximately the size of an iPad Mini, according to recent research from MIT, Purdue and Yale University—but switch off the camera and you'll save over 98 percent of those emissions.
• Emails: Professor Mike Berners-Lee calculated that a short email sent phone-to-phone over Wi-Fi equates to 0.3 grams of CO₂, a short email sent laptop-to-laptop emits 17g of CO₂ and a long email with attachment sent from laptop could produce 50g of CO₂.
• Digital hoarding: Data transfer and storage of thousands of photo, audio and video files, messages, emails and documents in an average US data center emits around 0.2 tons of CO₂ each year, for every 100 gigabyte of storage.
• Binge-watching in High Definition: Just one hour of HD streaming a day emits 160kg of CO₂ each year—but swap to Standard Definition video quality and that drops to around 8kg of CO₂ annually.
• Using supercomputers: Australian astronomers each produce 15 kilotons of CO₂ a year from super-computer work—more than their combined emissions from operating observatories, taking international flights and powering office buildings. However, Dutch astronomers produce about 4 percent of these emissions, as the Netherlands national supercomputer uses 100 percent renewable energy.
• Artificial Intelligence: Training a large AI model emits 315 times more carbon than a round-the-world flight.

The individual is not the only thing beyond the individual.

It can be difficult to understand the different impacts of our digital lives.

Many of these figures will change depending on things like the use of renewable energy that is being taken up by some digital corporations and people.

Understanding and addressing digital sustainable goes beyond individual responsibilities and is held by governments and corporations.

She believes that the onus should be on governments to regulate transparency on how digital corporations use energy.

The "planned obsolescence" paradigm is used by most device manufacturers, rather than the circular economy.

There was a big gap between the intentions of university staff and students when it came to the sustainable use of digital technologies.

She says that people had limited opportunities to do anything substantive about the issue.

Digital "solutionism" is not the right approach.

Digital solutionism can be seen in concepts like the paperless office, remote work and virtual conferences.

She says it's time to ask if being digital is always the most sustainable solution.

Our society is becoming increasingly entangled in the digital due to the exponential growth of intensely data driven activities and devices.

She pointed out that this is not universal.

She says there are different patterns and gaps in the digital affordances.

Changing Digital Geographies explores alternatives to digital growth and its impact on the natural world.

She says there are many options for how we live digitally, from making decisions about what's good enough to changing the way it is regulated.

Governments need to regulate and corporations need to act in order to improve our digital future.

More information: Jessica McLean et al, Digital (un)sustainability at an urban university in Sydney, Australia, Cities (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.cities.2022.103746