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I don’t know about you, but I am constantly worrying about whether or not I am doing enough to reduce my carbon footprint.

While it is largely up to industry leaders, massive corporations, and the government to address the climate crisis, the average Joe can also do their part.

The go-to is to recycle, reuse, and reduce across as many aspects of life as possible.

Such as, mending old clothes, buying second-hand, walking, cycling, carpooling, flying as little as possible, eating less meat, saving water…

Now, taking fewer photos, or deleting any unnecessary data at least, can be added to the mix.

Yep, as inconsequential as posting pictures online and storing emails might seem, these actions are actually contributing to the climate crisis in a big way.

As big as that of the airline industry, researchers have said via Sky News.

A new survey, commissioned by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), is calling us all out for what it calls our “dirty data” habits.

Essentially, taking that cliché coffee pic, or those millions of slightly varying pictures of your baby or pet doing that thing, is actually kind of damaging.

Not to mention all the junk and unnecessary content stored in your email inbox, as well as all the unnecessary data from streaming and downloading.

All that data, from all the millions of people doing the same thing, has to be stored in the cloud, and massive, energy-sucking data storage centres are needed for that.

Don’t let the ubiquitous and airy sounding “cloud” mislead you. Storage is very much physical and creates a huge carbon footprint.

Consider that the average UK adult takes almost 900 photos a year, with an average of five photos taken for every photo posted online.

All of that unneeded stored data generates so much carbon dioxide (CO2) that it is equivalent to that of 112 500 return flights from London to Australia, according to the research:

The duplicated and unwanted images left in storage accumulate 10,6 [kilograms] of CO2 emissions per person annually, based on the energy used and carbon footprint generated by data storage, either personally or on shared servers.

Here’s Chris Cartwright, Chair of the Digital Panel at the IET:

“Until now, a lot of the noise on carbon emissions has been focused on the big contributors – the aviation, transport, and food industries – or costly and disruptive solutions such as solar panels, micro-generation, storing energy using power walls and heat pumps. But the story doesn’t stop there.

“In our ever more connected lives, the data we now rely so much on also comes with a hidden carbon cost. Unsurprisingly, most of us don’t realise that our use of cloud storage means huge, power-hungry data centres are needed.”

I hope this is not a way for industry leaders, government officials, and CEOs to shift the blame. Regardless, it won’t hurt to do our best on an individual level.

The IET recommends creating a more “sustainable online lifestyle” by:

• deleting unwanted emails and photos,
• limiting the use of the ‘reply all’ function on emails.
• turning off auto-play on podcasts, and digital streaming services.
• and having ‘video off’ Zoom days.

Now you have an added complaint when that coworker hits ‘reply all’ when ‘reply’ would have sufficed.

Most of the data that exists at the moment has been generated from the last two years, and the trend apparently shows no sign of stopping.

There’s no time like the present to go through the archives and delete, delete, delete all that “dirty data”.

[source:skynews]