11 surprising actions that will make a difference in our energy consumption.
On Friday, May 5th, France surpassed in just four months the threshold of resource consumption that nature can replenish in a year. Developing environmental awareness and adopting small daily actions to limit our ecological impact is of paramount importance.
Ice Development presents a guide of 11 small actions that will reduce your ecological footprint in your consumption related to the use of new technologies.
Carefully select our keywords for web searches, and add bookmarks for our favorite sites.
A French person makes an average of 949 search queries per year in search engines, and there are nearly 67 million of us. The journey made by a query is about 15,000 km, the calculation is simple. Therefore, the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are considerable. The trick is to carefully select the keywords for our searches, to favor the use of “and / or” operators, and to place the important keywords of our searches in quotation marks. Placing our favorite sites in the bookmarks bar reduces our ecological footprint since this simple action reduces the number of searches on search engines.
Plant trees through committed search engines
Ecosia, Ecogine, Lilo…All these alternatives to Google invest the money collected from our searches into environmental actions and other solidarity causes.
Remove the logo from our email signature
It’s no longer a secret to anyone that sending and receiving emails generates CO2 emissions. The heavier the email, the higher the emissions. A logo in a signature significantly increases the weight of emails, and simply removing the logo from our signature after the first exchange has an impact.
Clean up our emails every week
Keeping emails in the inbox means storing them on servers that emit greenhouse gases and consume energy. Sorting through our emails weekly, keeping the most important ones and deleting the others, reduces our ecological footprint.
Limit our subscriptions to unnecessary newsletters
Unroll.me or CleanFox reduce the reception of unnecessary advertising emails, and thus also help to reduce our ecological footprint.
While writing this article, I tested CleanFox. It’s simple and really effective for doing a big clean-up and receiving fewer unnecessary emails.
Use file-sharing platforms for transferring our attachments
Wetransfer and Transfer Now are our friends. Sending an email with a 2 MB attachment is equivalent to leaving a 60 W light bulb on for 1 hour.
Protecting our electronic devices
Let’s take the example of the computer. Its manufacturing requires 22 kg of non-renewable and non-biodegradable chemicals, as well as 1.5 tonnes of water, among other things. Let’s take a sample of 50,000 people who extend the lifespan of their computers by 1 year, and we achieve a saving of 3,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases. The solution is simple : let’s make sure to turn off our devices when we are not using them and not give in too quickly to new technology. The impact will be doubly positive since, in addition to reducing our ecological footprint, we will save money.
Turning off our standby devices
10% of our electricity bill is what standby electronic devices account for. A power strip with a switch is a simple, ecological, and economical solution.
Limit our use of the Cloud
Storing heavy files on external hard drives reduces the energy consumption of data centers. More than 3,500 kg is the equivalent in oil of energy consumption per inhabitant in 2015, with data centers consuming between 5 and 10% of this.
Lower the brightness of our screens
Recharging our smartphones consumes energy and reduces their lifespan. Lowering the brightness of our screens has a considerable impact on our ecological footprint, but not only that, it also affects our finances and health.
Limit our use of Streaming
Streaming accounts for 82% of global internet traffic. Good practices ? Save programs to watch later, delete them afterward, and reduce the resolution of our viewing. Indeed, reducing the resolution of a film can divide our energy consumption by 10.
Here at Ice Development, we are many who understand the impact a small gesture can have, including the impact of a simple image in an email signature.
And you ? Did you know all these tips ? Have you already adopted one or more of these practices ? Feel free to share this article on social media to maximize the impact and raise awareness about simple actions that make a difference.
According to the article by the Foundation for Nature and Man titled “The Enlightened for Energy“