It is very difficult to notice this when browsing the web, yet our internet browsing has a real environmental impact. Today, it is estimated that digital activity accounts for 3.8% of global CO2 emissions per year. Can't figure out the proportion of this figure? To be clear, France emits 0.9% of CO2 per year, which is 4 times less than digital!
So it's time toawakening our ecological awareness on the web ! We reveal our tips for adopting responsible actions on the internet and reduce your digital footprint sustainably.
Turn off and unplug your devices
We very often tend to put our computer to sleep when we no longer use it, thinking that it consumes very little energy. But that's not true. Going to sleep can consume almost as much power as if your device was turned on. According to the ADEME, the annual consumption of a French household whose appliances are constantly on standby amounts to between 300 and 500 kWh. As a result, the energy bill every year is 10% higher than if the devices were not put on standby.
So the best solution is toturning off your computer devices when you no longer use them and unplug them: computers, screens, tablets ... And this can also apply to all other electronic equipment that you have. Unplugging them allows you to turn off the power andavoid unnecessary energy consumption.
But then do you have to turn off your computer every time? Even if you don't use it for only 1h? Indeed, in this case, sleep is to be preferred because it will avoid a greater energy consumption by constantly turning on your computer. But after an hour, force yourself to turn it off.
Close unused tabs
Having a bunch of tabs open on your browser, it has certainly happened to you before, hasn't it? And very often, we end up closing half of them without even having consulted them!
There is no point in leaving all these tabs open. In addition to not ending up there between all the open pages, it slows down your computer by requiring a lot of energy.
Simplify the management of your tabs bookmark the sites you visit frequently and close your tabs as you go. Honestly, how can one not be discouraged when 10 tabs are open and one has to read the entire contents of each one? Open one, read the contents and if you no longer need it, close it. You save time and will save energy !
Optimize your web searches
The impact of our Google searches on the environment is clearly invisible, yet our internet browsing has a significant environmental impact. For example, a query on Google produces about 7g of CO2. This is equivalent to about 511 million kilos of CO2 per year.
To limit to the maximum to perform queries on search engines, there are solutions.
To easily and quickly access your favorite sites, you can bookmark the sites you visit the most. Also, if you want to access a site and know the address of it, enter it directly in the URL bar of your browser. By doing so, you limit the number of queries on search engines as well as CO2 emissions, but you will also save time.
Finally, with the emergence of responsible and ecological search engines, you can do research while supporting environmental and solidarity causes. These search engines, at the ecological and solidarity consciousness, are excellent alternatives to other search engines to contribute to good causes around the world, including the preservation of the environment.
Ecosia
Ecosiais a search engine that works 100% thanks to therenewable energiesand who participates in the planting of trees around the world. When you perform 1 search, 1 tree is planted. A total of 65 million trees have been planted by Ecosia worldwide since its inception in 2009. By using Ecosia, you ensure that your personal data is not collected or sold to advertisers.Lilo
Lilois a100% French, solidarity and ethical search engine. With each search performed, you accumulate drops of water that represent the money generated. You can then donate your drops of water to associations and / or solidarity and environmental projects. Just like Ecosia, Lilo does not collect your data and does not resell it.
Ecogine
Created by three students,Ecogineis aethical and ecological French search engineof which all the revenue generated by advertising from Google is donated to solidarity and environmental associations. Ecogine is committed to compensating for all the CO2 emitted during Google searches by devoting part of their income to environmental projects.
Putting your mailbox green
Choosing an eco-friendly mailbox
First of all for putting your mailbox green, opt for a ecological and responsible mailbox as Lilo or else Newmanity.
Lilo Mail is a ecological and solidarity mailbox whose servers are French. It respects your privacy and optimizes the sending and storage of attachments as much as possible. Sending attachments is allowed up to 5 GB and has a low energy impact. Indeed, Lilo has implemented an automatic attachment management system to warn its users of unnecessary and too large attachments to delete to free up storage space.
As forNewmanity, it is ainnovative mailbox with low CO2 emission. The company ownsecological data centers powered by 100% renewable energies in order tolimiting digital pollution. Just like Lilo Mail, Newmanity respects your privacy by not exploiting any personal data.
Clean your mailbox
Why is it so important to empty and clean our mailbox? Our mailbox is one of the main causes of the digital pollutionbecause sending emails and storing them requires a lot of energy!
But how can emails consume so much energy? Emails are stored in data centers, or data centers, which are buildings filled with servers and other computer hardware that generate heat. To function, data centers then consume a lot of electricity and require constant air conditioning. And unfortunately, many of them are not powered by renewable energy.
So, for reducing our environmental impact, we are embarking on the cleaning our mailbox: we delete unnecessary and old emails, junk mail, recycle bin and our outbox. Then we create folders to keep our important emails and we take the opportunity to unsubscribe from newsletters that we never read.
Clean your mailbox will have a double benefit: you will contribute to the reduction of CO2 emissions and you will see more clearly in the managing your emails.
Browsing sites using eco-friendly web hosting
Soon eco-friendly web hosting, what exactly is it? To save and transmit data, any site must be hosted on servers so that Internet users can access the site. It then comes down to the data centers.
To give you a clear idea, we are currently counting near 1.7 billion websites worldwide.Now imagine the number of data that is stored and that passes through data centers every minute and every second.
Data centers are very energy-intensive, which is why in recent years, data centers green data centers operating entirely on renewable energy have created themselves.
Prefer local storage to the cloud
The online storage is very convenient for back up our data because they make it possible to store and secure our data and to have access to it from any computer, at any time. The goal is not to stop storing our data on the cloud, but rather tooptimize our data management and storage.
Thus, we advise you to prioritize light file storage on the cloud, such as Word documents, etc, and store your large files such as photos, videos and graphics files on USB flash drives and/or external hard drives.
In addition to being environmentally friendly, this will allow you toperform a large sorting in your data and you will notice the number of data that you do not have or no longer use and that do not need to be kept.
Conclusion
Adopt ecological and responsible actions in our daily life, this is good, but we too often abandon digital technology, which is nevertheless one of the major players in CO2 emissions, pollution and climate change. By putting into practice these simple gestures, you then contribute to reduce your digital and environmental footprint, without negatively impacting your internet browsing.
