The hidden impact of our online habits

Back in 2021, we wrote about the rising importance of digital sustainability. Often, we associate the topic of sustainability with tangible daily matters like car usage, plastic packaging, and recycling, and not so much with our usage of technology. But the impact of data and our digital habits has a significant impact on energy usage.

One of the first important moments was the rise of bitcoin mining and the corresponding energy usage it would take after its mainstream adoption to be profitable. Spurred on by the Covid years, the awareness of webcam usage, for example, further introduced the concept of our digital carbon footprint.

Currently, we are experiencing even more amplifiers of the urgency of digital sustainability, namely artificial intelligence and the shift of our digital lives to the cloud. To illustrate the scale with some statistics (this article):

• The IT, hardware, and software industry accounts for 3.9% of CO2 emissions worldwide, compared to 2.5% for the aviation industry.
• 3% of our electricity now goes to data centers. By 2030, it will be 6.5%.
• 50 to 70% of stored data is never used again: dark data.
• AI uses 10 to 20 times more energy than traditional search programs.
• By 2027, AI will use as much power as the Netherlands now uses in total.

Despite this, few people would be enthusiastic about giving up their technology in favor of a greener world. But the upside is, there is no real need to. So much of the energy that is used for websites, for example, is purely aesthetic or makes for a slightly better user experience. Just to illustrate: if Wikipedia’s globe icon were given a slightly lighter design, it would save—by some estimates—the equivalent of twenty London-Amsterdam flights every month. If something so small could save so much energy, what about, for example, the video previews on Netflix or YouTube when you hover over a title?

This shows that while we are currently designing the future, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit to capitalize on when making gains in sustainability. Replacing your entire brand’s supply chain with more ecologically responsible alternatives is a huge project. Opting for lightweight and power-saving digital tools in the future is easier.

In the end, this trend is nothing new, of course. The demand for sustainable lifestyles and brands has been increasing for a while. This is just a logical—but new—manifestation of the same trend. We wouldn’t be surprised to see more brands latching on in the near future, especially those with a big digital platform.