Digital Carbon Footprint: Businesses Can Make A Change!

Have you ever been involved in a virtual work or business meeting?

Do you regularly receive emails that promote a business?

The chances are that you will have answered 'yes' to at least one of the questions above?

Here is a final question...

Did you know that these company actions are contributing to the production of CO2 emissions into the Earth's atmosphere?

Well that's exactly the case! Keep reading to find out more about digital carbon footprint and learn about ways businesses can make a change in helping the environment.

@Shaun De'Ath

What Is Digital Carbon Footprint?

Digital carbon footprint can be defined as the total amount of CO2 emissions generated via the production, use and data transfer of digital devices and infrastructure. As explained by Gerry McGovern in his book, 'World Wide Waste', every digital action takes up a share of the Earth's energy and contributes hugely to the generation of toxic waste. This is due to digital technologies running on electricity which is generated from fossil fuels that produce CO2 emissions when combusted.

According to Hugues Ferreboeuf, the director of 'Lean ICT', the carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet and the systems supporting them are responsible for 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions. In addition, the global greenhouse emissions coming from aviation, also known as the operation of aircraft, stands at 2.4%, showing how much of a significant impact digital usage is having on the world's environmental problems in comparison to additional contributors. Furthermore, a study by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in 2021 has shown that 4.1 billion people use the internet worldwide, which is equivalent to 53.6% of the global population. This means that more than half of the world's population is contributing to the Earth's digital pollution.

Although digital usage can be viewed as a major contributor to the world's environmental problems. It can be argued that the world's digital carbon footprint can be reduced easily by just encouraging users to cut down on their usage habits. For example, users can unsubscribe from automatically generated newsletters to help reduce the number of spam emails sent out and received. Despite this, it is likely that not all users will make these changes due to a lack of awareness around how damaging digital usage actually is towards the environment.

How Have Businesses Been Addressing Environmental Issues?

The majority of climate change analysts have agreed that the world's carbon footprint needs to decrease to avoid a climate catastrophe. However, as mentioned in a 2020 study by Schmitt, Neufeld, Mackay and Dys-Steenbergen, a climate disaster cannot be avoided solely through individual actions. Therefore, the environment would benefit more from collective actions being made by all contributors to the production of CO2, including businesses who are major contributors.

@Shaun De'Ath

As reported by the Guardian's Tess Riley, a 2017 'Carbon Majors Report' found that 100 companies were responsible for more than 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. This shows the extent at which businesses have had a negative impact on the environment in the past three decades. Despite this, it appears that many companies are currently concentrating on repairing any damage that they may have previously caused to the environment. For example, in 2019 the fast-food chain McDonald's began using energy-efficient appliances at restaurants, helping them cut energy waste by 25%. This represents just one sustainable action made by companies worldwide, as research shows that around one-third of Europe's largest public companies have vowed to reach net zero by 2050. In simple terms, this means that these companies want to achieve a balance between the amount of CO2 emissions produced and removed from the world's atmosphere by 2050.

Furthermore, the likelihood of additional companies joining the pledge to reach net zero by 2050 is extremely high, especially following COP26 discussions which saw the United Kingdom (UK) Government encourage the global private sector to join the 'United Nations (UN) Race to Zero'. In these discussions, numerous issues were addressed including the fears of companies that were unwilling to join the 'UN Race to Zero'. The main reason behind companies not joining the 'UN Race to Zero' was due to the belief that people and the planet should not be prioritised over profits, as these companies feared that sustainable action would come at an economic expense. However, in the UK Government's 2021 COP26 press release, this fear was addressed with the mention that between 1990 and 2019, the UK economy grew by 78% while carbon emissions fell by 44%, showing that tackling climate change has no negative effects on the economy. Furthermore, this showed the positive influence companies are currently having on combatting climate change, however it appears that there is still a lot of work ahead, especially for businesses.

How Is The Digital Carbon Footprint Of Businesses Affecting The Environment?

According to a BBC Report in 2020, the internet emits 1.6 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually, with the internet using 84 to 143 gigawatts of electricity per year, which is produced by the combustion of fossil fuels. Businesses largely contribute to these numbers by using the internet for e-commerce, advertising and corporate communication purposes. Businesses further contribute to the production of CO2 emissions with every digital action that is made by them. For example, in the case that a company has developed their own website, each page view will produce 1.76g of CO2 emissions. This means that a site with 100,000 page views per month will emit 2.112kg of CO2 every year.

In response, the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft have been attempting to help reduce the digital carbon footprint of businesses worldwide by providing cloud computing services that run on renewable energy. These services can be used by companies to store all forms of digital data while reducing CO2 emissions simultaneously. Despite these efforts, helping companies reduce their digital carbon footprint has become more challenging since companies appear to be digitalising everything, such as cars, machines, robots and artificial intelligence. Consequently, this has resulted in larger amounts of data having to be stored in data centres, which leads to more carbon being emitted. Anders Andrae, a representative of Huawei, adds to this by predicting that the ICT industry is on track to use 20% of all electricity and emit up to 5.5% of the world's carbon emissions by 2025, due to the increasing rate at which digital data is being used. This shows the extent at which the increasing digital data usage of companies is negatively impacting the environment.

What Can Companies Do To Reduce Their Digital Carbon Footprint?

As mentioned above, companies worldwide have been working on reducing their carbon footprint. However, in relation to their digital carbon footprint, there appears to be less movement towards making a change, with the usage of digital data instead having increased over time. Therefore, it is vital that companies promptly address their digital carbon footprint.

Here are a few ways that companies can do this:

1) Reduce The Number Of Outgoing Emails

Email marketing is a direct marketing tool regularly used by companies worldwide to build relationships with potential and existing customers. According to research by 'The Radicati Group Inc.', a technology market research firm, 319 billion business and consumer emails were sent and received globally per day in 2021, with this number expected to reach 376 billion by 2025. As mentioned by Mike Berners-Lee, all these emails are damaging to the environment with it being found that a year of incoming email adds up to 135kg of CO2 emissions.

As shown above, emails have a negative effect on the environment. Therefore, companies must find ways to reduce the number of outgoing emails, in order to reduce CO2 emissions. Energy company 'OVO' found that more than 64 million unnecessary emails are sent every day, and that sending less unnecessary emails can lead to over 16,433 tonnes of carbon a year being saved. Therefore, one way companies can reduce CO2 emissions is by avoiding the use of unnecessary emails, such as emails that say "thank you for emailing".

Furthermore, it is legally required that companies provide consumers with the option to unsubscribe from receiving spam email, however, companies can help the environment further by making it an easier process for customers to unsubscribe. This can be done by making the unsubscribe option more visible on platforms and providing customers with step-by-step guidance on how to unsubscribe.

2) Begin Storing Data On A Green Cloud Provider

According to Michael McNerney, the Vice-President of marketing and network security at 'Supermicro', the number of data centres worldwide have escalated from 500,00 in 2012 to 8 million in 2019. These data centres store and process data, including cloud data which is stored on individual servers at data centres.

As shown above, data centres and the cloud are capable of creating pollution. Despite this, companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft have started providing 'green clouds' since 2014 which enable companies to decarbonise the data they intend to store. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the current green cloud data centres could save up to 629 million metric tons of CO2 emissions by 2025 if companies migrated to the cloud. Therefore, companies could consider swapping to a green cloud provider if they haven't already, as this would help them significantly reduce their carbon footprint.

3) Reduce The Number Of Digital Devices Being Used For Virtual Business Meetings

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, many changes were made to the way people work. One of these changes was replacing face-to-face meetings with virtual meetings, in which the use of Zoom daily meetings escalated from 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to over 300 million daily meeting participants in April 2020.

As shown above, using virtual video conferencing platforms, such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, does have a significant impact on the digital carbon footprint of companies. Therefore, companies should consider different approaches to reduce their digital carbon footprint via virtual calls. An approach that companies should consider is sharing a laptop among multiple people for virtual business meetings, rather than having each person on an individual laptop. Consequently, this will help companies reduce screen usage time, which, in turn, will help the company reduce the amount of CO2 emissions being produced via virtual video calls.

Summary

It is apparent that companies are finally deciding to address environmental issues by creating and using new eco-friendly innovations and approaches. However, it appears that a large number of companies are failing to make any major improvements to their digital carbon footprint, with many companies still sending an excessive amount of emails, storing their data in environmentally unfriendly data centres and overly using digital devices for virtual meetings. Due to this, a lot of improvement is needed collectively by companies worldwide to address these issues. These improvements can include companies cutting down on unnecessary emails, switching to green cloud providers and reducing the amount of digital devices being used for virtual meetings.