Gerry McGovern
Gerry has published eight books. His latest, World Wide Waste, examines the impact digital is having on the environment. He developed Top Tasks, a research method which helps identify what truly matters to people. The Irish Times has described Gerry as one of five visionaries who have had a major impact on the development of the Web.
Every device has a carbon footprint
If you want to understand and measure—and ultimately reduce—digital waste then you must start with the digital devices, because it is in the manufacture and disposal of digital devices where 80% or more of the CO2 and other waste occurs. Next, you need to understand the data. How it is created. How it is stored and transferred. How it is accessed. How it is used. How it is archived and deleted.
You take the devices and the data and you add time and weight. How long does it take to create the digital artefact? How much weight? The second key element of time is use. How much is the digital artefact being used and how much time for each use?
I’ve done quite a bit of research over the years trying to understand how long it takes to create particular pieces of content. For example, I found that to create a 1,000-word piece of content, it can take about 20 hours. That includes ideation, drafting, feedback, revision, sign-off, publishing.
Those 20 hours all involve using a digital device, most likely a laptop. I’ve done a lot of research on trying to measure the total CO2 of a smartphone, laptop, etc. Based on my calculations, if you use a laptop for one hour then you are responsible for anywhere from 60 to 120 grams of CO2, depending mainly on how much CO2 was produced during the manufacture of that laptop and the total life of the device.
On a laptop that has a life of three years, the CO2 per hour of use is 107 g. Thus, the CO2 cost for creating this document would be 2.14 kg. If, on the other hand, that laptop has a working life of seven years, then the total CO2 for creating the document drops to 1.3 kg.
Digital content carbon footprint
However, this is just a small part of the CO2 picture for this content. A 1,000-word piece of content takes about four minutes to read. Let’s say it’s read 10,000 times. That’s 666 hours of use, far more than the 20 hours it took to create the content. Let’s assume all that use occurs on laptops that have a three-year life. We’re talking about 75 kg of CO2 here for use, 97% of the overall total. If, however, the 10,000 reads occurred on smartphones, that 75 kg would drop to 11 kg. Why? One major reason is that while manufacturing a laptop can cause 300 kg of CO2, manufacturing a smartphone causes ‘just’ 60 kg.
Optimise for mobile, delete data
In conclusion, designing a website that works great on mobile is better for the environment, and deleting the digital content that we no longer need cuts our digital carbon footprint.
Learn more
Data Centre power consumption in Ireland
How carbon neutral Data Centres – and digital content – are achievable
Image credits
Header image Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/android-blur-cellular-close-up-301718/
Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/macbook-pro-beside-white-ipad-4158/
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