How much does your company contribute to climate change? How can you reduce its impact? Climate change is real, and it’s happening now. According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), global carbon emissions must fall by 2030 to reach net-zero emissions. That means every country has to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions significantly.
That means we also must change how we live, including at the office.
Send an email, search the Internet, download a document from the cloud… All these everyday actions seem trivial. However, they do have an impact on the environment, mainly because of data storage.
Today, nearly 5 billion people use the Internet regularly. So reducing our digital carbon footprint is essential. To help you, we have unearthed 5 unusual tips to simply and effectively do so.
#1: Sort & Delete Your Emails
We grant you, this first tip is not the most surprising, but it is undoubtedly one of the most effective. By deleting 30 emails, you will save the same amount of energy as a light bulb consumes for a day. Even better, unsubscribe from unnecessary newsletters, promos, and other spam that you will never open.
#2: Use Browser Shortcuts
This is very simple. It allows you first to save precious time in the office and reduce your digital carbon footprint. By using a shortcut, you will use 4 times less energy than if you went through a standard search engine.
#3: Close Your Inactive Tabs
Often, during a search, we open several pages, which, in the end, will never be looked at. Therefore, you would think that these inactive browser tabs do not consume energy. Wrong! They constantly communicate and send information, which, as you can imagine, consumes energy.
#4: Choose An Ecological Font
There are fonts designed to use as little ink as possible when printing. For example, the Ecofont font reduces ink use by more than 20% compared to the average of the other fonts.
#5: Lower The Brightness Of Your Screens
The brighter a screen, the more energy it consumes. By reducing the brightness, you save energy and battery life, and your eyes will thank you!
Bonus Tips
- Use a sustainable search engine like Ecosia.
- Prefer reconditioned to new
- Unplug your devices when they are fully charged or after use
- Don’t overuse cloud storage
- Reduce your number of searches
- Add to your email signature the words “Only print this email if it is really necessary”
- Use a recycling service for all your electronics
Simple things can be done, and they’re a matter of common sense, so if everyone did them, we’d have less of an impact on the environment.
Let us know what you think about these tips. Do you have any others?
