With so much of our lives online, it’s important to consider how our everyday action affect our digital carbon footprints. Here are some quick wins for a digital declutter, to free up space and lower your digital footprint:
- Delete old and unnecessary emails so they are no longer taking up space – regular inbox clean ups reduces the total storage energy footprint (don’t forget your spam folder too!).
- Focus on deleting large emails, newsletters and attachments.
- If you find yourself subscribing to newsletters with the best intentions and then always deleting them without reading them (guilty!), then consider unsubscribing to minimise waste.
- Limit attachments so you’re not sending large emails – use Google Drive, We Transfer etc instead of sending large files repeatedly.
- Avoid unnecessary emails such as ‘thanks’ or ‘ok’ where possible – these really do add up at scale.
If every adult in Britain sent one less email a day, we could reduce our carbon output by 16,433 tonnes – equal to more than 81,000 flights from London to Madrid
A study shows that
71% of Britons said they wouldn’t mind not receiving a thank you email if it helped the environment.You could even consider adding a short note to your email signature along the lines of “Please don’t feel you need to respond to this email unless necessary” to encourage people to think before responding. (Source)
These are just a few simple ways that can help to free up storage space and lower your digital footprint. We bet that it feels great to have a digital declutter, too!