Lesson 1Does “Digital” equal “Green” ?
- Notion 1 - What´s the environmental impact of the digital world?
- Notion 2 - Sizing up Internet´s carbon emissions.
- Notion 3 - What is the environmental impact of our working habits? (devices)
- Notion 4 - What is the environmental impact of our working habits? (services)
- Notion 5 - Design is where sustainability happens.
- Notion 6 - Review of the main concepts.
Notion 1
What´s the environmental impact of the digital world?
Target skills
Welcome to the first Unit of our course on Eco Web design.
In this Unit, we will try to understand whether our daily digital activity affects the environment and if so, to what extent.
There is no doubt of the increasing awareness of environmental alert nowadays. As a response to it, most of us are currently trying to act: we recycle, ride bicycles, avoid printing out as well as reduce paper use, refuse plastic, switch to electric cars etc.
We almost take for granted that digitalizing our everyday activities we get “greener”. However, it is a misleading conception, because digital waste also exists, even if we don´t see it.
Depending upon its source digital pollution can be divided into 2 main parts:
- Caused by direct human activity: manufacturing and shipping of hardware. It produces about 80% of digital environmental impact. Producing electronic devices involves raw materials extraction, which aren´t renewable. The side effects caused by these extractions, are that some regions suffer from deforestation and in some regions the exploitation is carried out in semi-slavery conditions. The demand for the devices increases though, which means more extraction.
Both the components and the devices themselves require transportation, which means pollution.
Let´s not forget about electronic waste. According to European Parliament, e-waste is now the fastest growing waste stream in the EU.
- Caused by indirect human activity: powering and cooling. Any device, as well servers and data centres must be powered and cooled. This means they consume electricity from the local grids. 36.7% of global electricity comes from low-carbon sources, in Europe in 2020 renewables made up 38 % of electricity mix. It´s a significant shift towards cleaner energy, but still not sufficient. Therefore, each time we plug in a charger we leave a carbon footprint.
Digital technologies are responsible for 4% of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) that is more than the entire aviation industry.
Further in this unit we´ll see more specific numbers that present a real picture of digital waste.