It was on March 12, 1989, at CERN, Geneva, that the concept of the Internet was born. Today, 30 years later, the net has completely changed our lives: how we communicate, work, get entertained, informed, or do our shopping. But the reality is that the net also includes a huge impact on our planet.
On one hand, manufacturing cellphones, laptops, and other forms of devices and equipment mean extracting (and separating or transporting) lanthanon minerals from the planet. On the opposite hand, data centers that represent the “cloud” on Earth are a synonym with energy consumption because of the storage and therefore the permanent flow of knowledge … In 2015, with GreenIT.fr, the web was estimated to represent 600 million tonnes of CO2 a year – the maximum amount because the world’s total civil aviation.
Therefore, is now ever necessary to play a more ecological role in what concerns the way we use the net and therefore the devices that allow us to try to do so. Here are 5 simple tips to scale back the impact of your internet usage on the environment.
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1. Keep Your Laptop And Other Digital Equipment for Extended Periods
When we consider the pollution created by the net, we regularly think first of all about the information centers and also the huge energy they consume. Yet, the truth is more nuanced. The web wouldn’t exist without all of our connected laptops, mobile phones, or tablets that allow us to access the network. And contrary to popular belief, it’s the manufacture of those devices that weighs the foremost within the environmental footprint of the net at the worldwide level.
We consume (buy and discard) huge numbers of various tech devices per annum in order that we are able to be connected to the net, and therefore the greenest gesture we will put into practice to scale back our digital footprint is certainly to limit this consumption. How or what – you will wisely ask? Well, first, extend the lifetime of your equipment to its maximum extent so you’ll keep them for extended.
For this, you wish to require excellent care of them and avoid possible damages. If rather than changing laptop every 3-4 years, you’ll be able to keep it 6 or perhaps 8 years, you’ll halve its impact – is sensible, right?
2. Avoid Over-Consuming Video Streaming
Streaming is now one of the largest consumers of energy regarding our Internet usage. Generating quite high energy consumption is the transfer of real-time data for videos, which is often viewed in high definition quality. One of the simplest ways to scale back the Internet’s energy consumption would be to limit the employment of streaming. This can be true for every folk as a user: watch fewer videos, and as far as possible less often in HD. This includes live streaming of games promoted by service providers like Stream Marketer.
But this is often is additionally valid, for example, for website designers, who build their webpages with automatic launching videos that increase the load of the info to be loaded by users. And in fact, it’s also the case with major web platforms that store on their servers many billions of bytes of video data broadcast on an outsized scale.
Whether you’re obsessed with small cat videos, music videos, or movies and series on Netflix, consider it: streaming contains a big impact on the earth. And lots of of those uses will be limited: music is heard without viewing the clip for instance.
3. With Online Storage and the “Cloud,” Be Reasonable
In the same way as streaming, online storage solutions just like the cloud cause lots of energy consumption. Each photo or data you store online must be permanently preserved on a server that has to be powered. And each time you would like to access this data you have got to exchange data with this server which still consumes more energy – both on your terminal, and via the network.
So don’t store all of your data within the cloud and favor local storage whenever possible in order that you’ll reduce the energy consumption associated with your Internet use.
4. Find Out How To Use Your Equipment Better
A large part of energy consumption linked to the net often comes from the bad use of a kit. For instance, most consumers leave their internet box turned on during the night, which consumes energy for nothing. Many consumers also still use 4G reception rather than their wifi, but browsing wifi consumes much less energy than browsing the mobile network. If possible, choose wifi navigation.
Similarly: avoid watching TV via ADSL. Today, many TV channels allow you to look at them via ADSL, which implies accessing the content using the net (via your laptop or tablet, for example). However, this consumes plenty more energy! when possible, choose TNT (turner network television) and DDT (digital terrestrial television) broadcasting.
in the most intelligent way possible, use your equipment in the same way. As an example, don’t leave your cellphone’s battery get completely empty because it shortens its lifecycle because of programmed obsolescence.
5. Find Better Ways to Sort Out Your Emails (Without Necessarily Deleting Them)
Finally, the last step which will help reduce your environmental impact after you use the net is to manage your emails. But use caution, that doesn’t mean that you simply must delete them. In fact, removing emails isn’t very useful from the environmental point of view because most of the impacts of an email are during the writing phase and therefore the mail transport phase. Once sent, removing it doesn’t have a giant impact on the carbon footprint.
