9 tips to limit your ecological footprint on the Internet

If the Internet were a country, it would be the third largest consumer of electricity in the world, just behind China and the United States. In addition, digital is the fastest growing energy industry in the world. It consumes 10 to 15% of the world’s electricity, the equivalent of 100 medium-sized nuclear reactors. Internet pollution, we are looking for solutions…

Limiting the time you spend on your digital screens can have a significant impact on reducing your carbon footprint personal, a way to act on your scale against climate change.

I explain to you why three arguments :

When you watch a 10-minute HD video, it consumes as much energy asan LED bulb lit for 16 hours. And the emails you send in a working day produce as much CO2 emissions as an 11 kilometer car journey.
If the Internet was a country, it would be the third largest consumer of electricitybehind China and the United States.
The digital is the fastest growing energy industry in the world with
(+8% per year). Its energy consumption doubles every 7 years.

Digital consumption is racing

In a climate of energy transition, the growth of the web constitutes a real environmental issue for the coming years. Digital consumption is growing exponentially: it doubles every 6 or 7 years.

In terms ofCO2 emissions, the Internet pollution is greater than the airline industry. Half of the greenhouse gases produced by the Internet come from the user, the other half being divided between the network and the data centers (the famous data centers).

If the Internet were a country, it would be the third largest consumer of electricity in the world with 1500 TWH per year, just behind China and the United States. Some experts argue that electricity consumption linked to the Internet could become, in the near future, the world’s leading source pollution.

Side computer equipment (this includes your mobile phone), you must do your best to maintain your devices and, in the event of a breakdown or malfunction, seek to have them repaired rather than replaced.

If you have no choice, favor second-hand devices over serious addresses like eBay Where Back Market whose self-proclaimed mission is to make refurbished products as reliable as they are desirable“.

In any case, don’t throw away your old devices, they can be useful to other people, associations or recyclers. Resell them or give them away depending on their condition.

internet data center pollution

With the development of big data over the past decade, data centers are at the heart of the unstoppable growth of digital. Their ecological impact now represents 4% of electricity consumption worldwide.

A data center consumes as much electricity as a French town of 30,000 inhabitants. Thus, the approximately 200 data centers on French territory would concentrate 8% of French electricity consumption*.

Fortunately, steps have been taken to reduce the environmental impact of data centers, such as 100% powered by renewable energy.

We also seek, when possible, to locate in cold countries (Canada, Scandinavia, Russia…) for enjoy the fresh air to cool computers. This reduces the use of air conditioning, which accounts for 40% of a data center’s energy consumption.

We also try to recover the heat emitted in data centers by redirecting air flows or water circuits towards collective facilities or industrial areas.

Even if the practice remains experimental, test installations exist. In France, the Val-d’Europe aquatic center (Seine-et-Marne) has been heating its five pools for ten years thanks to the heat produced by the data center next door.

9 tips to limit your digital footprint

According to Google, there was 5 billion internet users in 2020, which represents 2/3 of the world’s population. These users (that’s all of us!) are responsible for 50% of the internet’s greenhouse gases. It is therefore urgent to make ourselves aware of our ecological impact and the actions to reduce our carbon footprint.

On the digital side, you have to monitor a few points which, accumulated throughout the year, can make a real difference (especially if you are a heavy user):

First always trys prefer an internet connection via wifi or cable rather than mobile (3G, 4G or 5G).
Next, limits the quality and quantity of videos you watch because a 10-minute HD video is equivalent in energy to 16 hours of consumption of a standard LED bulb. Not easy when you know that at the end of 2020, netflix alone represented a little more than 20% of internet traffic in France. Studies have shown that streaming an HD movie emits so many greenhouse gases than making, transporting and playing a DVD!
When you use Google, take the time to formulate your queries well to do as little as possible. According to a Harvard researcher, each search on Google emits 7 g of CO₂. Thus, the CO2 emitted every day by emails around the world is equivalent to more than 20000 round trips between Paris and New York.
You can also test the “responsible” search engineswhich claim to offset CO emissions₂. This is the case of the French association engine Ecogine which finances environmental projects orEcosia which plants a tree every 7 seconds.
And the emails you send in a working day produce as many CO emissions₂ one 11 km drive. Sending an email with a 1 MB attachment releases 19 g of CO₂ and its power consumption is equivalent to that of a light bulb for one hour. In fact, more than 12 billion emails are sent every hour in the world, emitting a total of 50 GWh (gigawatt hour), i.e. the hourly electricity production of 18 nuclear power plants.
Try not to keep only the emails you need. A message stored in your mailbox requests servers that scan our emails permanently.
If you want to be overzealous (even if it’s marginal), you can also compress attachments, send photos in low resolution and limit the number of recipients of your emails.
Mark the sites you visit often in favoriteit avoids the dispensable research to find them.
Finally, only keep important files in the cloud. Data storage is growing rapidly and theinfinite appearance of the cloud accustoms us to storing files that are often heavy (but not always useful) that require the uninterrupted use of servers to store them.