Digital CleanUp + Wise-Up Challenge

Digital is physical. Digital is not green. Digital costs the Earth. Every time I download an email I contribute to global warming.

Gerry McGovern, World Wide Waste.

We’re all familiar with annual clean up day. That one day a year when you join your neighbours, sweeping and picking litter from every nook and cranny of your local area. In Ireland it’s our ‘National Spring Clean Day’ which is run by An Taisce and happens each April. It runs over the course of the month but each estate or group can pick one day in which they will dedicate to cleaning up a particular outdoor area. It’s a great initiative as it encourages everyone to get involved, feel part of their community and take positive action against waste pollution. But did you know there’s also a Digital CleanUp Day? Or that there was even a need for such a thing?

Definition of hoarder or hoarding disorder: ‘where someone acquires an excessive number of items and stores them in a chaotic manner, usually resulting in unmanageable amounts of clutter‘.

You may have seen images of the inside of a hoarders home, each room a labyrinth of books, stacks of paper, even bags of rubbish or food. To the hoarder these items are important, though they’re not really sure why. Most of us would not keep ceiling high stacks of papers or rubbish in our home but as digital consumers on our laptops, on our phones, in our office or at home, we are all hoarders. We’re building towers of data, and contributing to tons of waste that we never really give a second thought to.

When we think of digital, we think of the internet or ‘the cloud’, and we think of it as “out there” or “up there” but not really physically there. On the contrary, even aside from the physical space data centers require, the internet consumes massive amounts of energy, and it creates massive amounts of C02 and toxic waste. In terms of carbon emissions it’s now surpassed the aviation industry and yet there are no huge campaigns encouraging us to ‘offset’ our digital carbon (Offsetting is a contentious topic but we’ll come to that in a minute)!

That’s a shit load of trees. Planting trees is definitely good but we simply don’t have enough planet to plant enough trees to offset the damage (that’s the offsetting contention I mentioned earlier). Digital is improving/increasing at a rapid rate and the better it gets the more we consume. So we need to address our relationship with our devices and the amount of data we consume and store. Large companies have to take responsibility but we can each play our own part. The main thing is that we have this knowledge and we spread this knowledge.

Digital Wise-up Challenge

I’m as guilty as the next person when it comes to digital hoarding; both physical and digital. When I was younger I went through so many phones, but I never gave it a single thought beyond throwing my “old” phone in a drawer and purchasing another phone. None of these phones were top of the range but that’s not the point. It got to the stage where I had a “phone drawer” – this is a form of physical hoarding. I could and should have passed those phones on to someone else. Our phones are built and marketed to be “upgraded” or replaced every few years. If we look after our phones/laptops we can double or triple their intended lifespan. Here’s how:

• Fix/repair
• Sell/give away
• Buy refurbished
• Buy simple/low tech/high quality
• Think before downloading apps
• Don’t drain your battery
• Don’t leave plugged in on full charge
• Use dark mode
• Dim your screen
• Watch video in standard rather than HD.
• Close tabs not in use
• No screensavers
• Avoid turning on your video on calls where possible
  
  

One hour of streaming or video conferencing can emit between 150 and 1,000 grams of carbon dioxide, depending on the service. That hour also requires 2-12 liters of water and a land area about the size of an iPad Mini. Those hours add up in our daily lives with all the time we’re spending on video — and so does the associated environmental footprint.

source

I definitely noticed a difference in the my phone’s battery life when I removed apps and disabled notifications. Looking after our devices will make them last longer which when you consider the amount of natural resources, not to mention child labour to make a phone/laptop, it’s the least we can all do.

Digital CleanUp challenge

Reducing and removing data lessens C02 emissions. As a plus, bulk deleting emails is extremely therapeutic! Of course it’s better to get to a place where you don’t have as many emails to begin with. Here’s some tips to begin:

• Avoid subscribing to newsletter or email lists you don’t need and are probably not even going to read. Think hard before you hit that subscribe button.
• Archive important emails and bulk delete the rest.
• Do you use an image or images in your email signature? Consider removing it/them!
• Do you really need to send a thank you email or can you say thank you in advance?
• Delete duplicate images/images you don’t need
• Same as above for video

A good place to start is Digital Clean Up Day on the 18th March. You can take part by yourself or encourage colleagues to join you. Read more about that here. Of course you don’t have to wait for March 18th to roll around every year. I find it best to do a mini digital cleanup once a month.

Why not get involved in a physical spring clean in your area too! Read more here

Also purchase, read and tell all of your friends and colleagues to read World Wide Waste by Gerry McGovern. He also hosts free informative webinars and has a podcast: https://gerrymcgovern.com/

Another digital sustainability podcast to check out is Green I/O by Gael Duez. I always come away from his chats feeling energised and armed with knowledge. Sticking to the theme, check out Episode #14 Digital Cleanup Day with Ingrid Nielsen and Olivier Vergeynst https://greenio.gaelduez.com/

For the ultimate digital declutter the best of the best in Sustainable Web Design Wholegrain Digital have a made an easy to follow toolkit