Digital Cleanup Day - Are you in?
Posted on February 13, 2024 • 4 min read • 738 words
“Digital Cleanup Day? What’s that?” you might be asking yourself. Then I have another question for you. Do you know “World Cleanup Day”? Once a year, on September 20th in 2024, there’s a global cleanup initiative in more than 190 countries. More than 50 million volunteers dedicate themselves to picking up as much litter as possible. But how does this relate to Digital Cleanup Day? Well, just as nature can be polluted by litter, so can your digital environment become a burden on the environment.
Isn’t digital supposed to be environmentally friendly?
Your digital environment might seem harmless to the environment because it doesn’t directly emit greenhouse gases or waste, not like cars or factories do. But your digital items need to be stored somewhere. Have you ever considered that your emails, videos, social media, and everything you do online are also stored somewhere? Just like your life on this planet leaves an ecological footprint, so does your digital life.
Once you save things ‘in the cloud,’ the companies behind this, the cloud providers, need servers. Those servers require electricity, cooling, and a place to exist. A significant amount of electricity is used for this purpose. Hence, every email and tweet indeed has an impact on the environment.
The data center, where your digital life is stored, thus needs a lot of electricity to function and to cool the servers. Otherwise, they could overheat. The production of electricity often still uses fossil fuels, such as coal or gas. This leads to the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. If a data center uses ‘green electricity,’ then that green electricity is not available for other uses. Besides electricity, cooling is also needed to dissipate the heat from the servers. Ultimately, this heat is ’lost’ energy, which returns to the environment as heated water or warm air.
Data centers also need space. The construction of the data centers themselves is also not very good for the environment.
Other aspects of your digital life have an impact on the environment too. Consider electronic waste. Replacing your (whether broken or not) electronic devices, such as your mobile, leads to a rapidly growing stream of electronic waste, or e-waste. In addition to rare minerals and metals, these often contain harmful substances. The extraction of these rare minerals and metals can also lead to environmental pollution and ecological disruption, as the extraction process is not always conducted neatly. Besides, the available reserves are limited.
What can you do
Well, to start, you can become aware of the impact of your digital actions and storage frenzy. I know, I’m guilty of it too. By again writing an article about the environment, various servers are working for me. Google, Bing, and similar sites index this article to present it to you when you’re searching for something. My web host needs extra space on the server for this article. And, should the article be widely read, the server needs more processing power to let you read it.
A few things you could do to reduce your digital footprint:
- Clean up your phone/clean out the contents of your phone. Maybe your phone will even become faster, so you don’t have to buy a new one.
- Clean up your PC/laptop, clean out the contents of your PC and/or laptop. The same applies as for your phone.
- Clean up your mailbox. Every email you no longer read is essentially one too many. After all, you don’t keep every newspaper and pamphlet that comes through your letterbox, right? So why would you do that digitally?
- Unsubscribe from newsletters when you haven’t read them for ages. Every bit that doesn’t need to be sent is one less. And, an added benefit, the mail that’s really important stands out more.
- Unsubscribe from unused services. Do you really watch all those streaming services? It also saves you money on top of reducing data storage.
In summary: Reduce your data storage. Don’t unnecessarily keep large amounts of emails, photos, documents, and other files in the cloud or on your own computer or in your mailbox. Regularly delete old or unnecessary files and keep your storage clean and organized. They’re all just small bits, but all these small bits together can be quite significant. Then you’re contributing to Digital Cleanup Day.
When is digital cleanup day?
Are you also marking Digital Cleanup Day in your calendar? March 16, 2024, is the date!