It's Climate Week

Hardware, emails, and drunk-dials to your ex included.

Kidding aside, there are a lot of things you can and should do to lower the carbon footprint of your tech this Climate Week. 

What most people fail to realize is that our gadgets, the internet, and the systems that support them are estimated to add up to about 3.7%  of our global emissions. To put that into perspective, the aviation industry only makes up 2% of human carbon emissions. Yikes, right?

Let’s be realistic here, you probably aren’t about to ditch your devices. But here are a few things we’ve learned about reducing carbon emissions:

Save files to your hard drive… and fry up some spam. The email kind, that is.

Storing emails produces more carbon emissions than you might think: 0.3 grams per spam, 4 grams for a regular email and 50 grams for each email with an attachment. With the average American having 500 unread emails in their inbox at any given time, that’s no small fry.

If everyone in the world deleted 10 emails, we’d be reducing 86,059,649 pounds of carbon emissions. For your images and videos, if you must save them on the cloud, try looking for a cloud storage service that uses renewable energy. Brr, is it cold in here? We feel the temperature dropping already.

...for records (or CDs, if that’s your thing).

Streaming music produces about 441 – 772 million pounds of greenhouse gas emissions. Feels heavy. But before you delete Spotify, just know that streaming isn’t always bad. If you only listen to a song once or twice, streaming is the greener option. 

But, if you find yourself listening to Celine Dion’s Greatest Hits (uh, what?) more than 27 times, then the best option for reducing carbon emissions would be listening to it on a vinyl record, CD or cassette tape (yes, we see you pencil-rewinding diehards).

If you must scroll, stream and save everything on the cloud, do it on a refurbished device

Yes, yes, yes this is very self-serving of us to mention. But it’s also very true. By extending the life of a device and buying something from the circular economy, you are able to maximize the use of something that took a huge amount of energy (and that took a sh*tload of emissions to produce). 

Just an example: manufacturing a new smartphone produces around 123 pounds of carbon emissions. That sounds more like someone’s unrealistic weight goal than the carbon emissions of an object that fits in your pocket, don’t you think? Renewing a smartphone produces 24 pounds of CO2e. That’s not nothing...but it’s still much less than buying new.

Oh, and one last thing... just wanted to leave you with a little gem we found hidden on the internet. This Climate Week, why not try some “Sustainable Sexting”? And don’t worry, in case you were wondering, all those emojis have a negligible carbon footprint. Enjoy!