Digital waste causes environmental damage and consumes electricity
On January 31st, a nationwide digital cleanup day will take place again, with the aim of getting rid of excess digital waste. This can be compared to the “Let’s Do It!” campaign, where courtyards, forest undergrowth, and other places are cleaned up across Estonia. Together, we can make Estonia much cleaner. Digital waste is often invisible, but it also affects the environment around us.
“Anything we consume can become digital waste – for example, TV series, pictures on our phones or computers, YouTube video clips, sent emails, or even e-government services that we no longer use,” said GreenDice CEO Argo Alaniit.
A couple of months ago, GreenDice started cooperating with schools in Järva Municipality. The main goal of the cooperation is to ensure that Järva Municipality students have access to the digital world with high-quality devices, but another goal is to guide students to build a proper digital identity. “More and more learning materials are being created in the online environment, and the best education can be brought to children if teachers know how to direct them to the right materials. At the same time, we need to start raising awareness from the grassroots level that everything we create in the computer world creates digital waste, and this in turn creates real waste and environmental damage,” said Alaniit.
“If you put logs in the stove, they will give us warmth in the room, but ashes will remain, which must be taken out of the room again and again. The same thing happens with oil shale – while for most people, electricity simply arrives home through a metal wire, increasingly large ash mountains are rising in Ida-Virumaa,” Alaniit drew an analogy to the creation of digital waste. At first glance, it is not clear that our activity in the digital world could cause waste, but it is. The digital world loves electricity, and all the devices that use electricity are not immediately visible to people.
The world’s largest server park, or data center in other words, is in China and its area is one hundred hectares. “This data center consumes 1.3 TWh of electricity; to produce such an amount of electricity, it would be necessary to erect, for example, 60 large wind turbines in Järva Municipality. Thus, digital waste is simply data created by people that has been left “lying around” in these same server parks and for the storage of which we as a society have to install more and more wind turbines or build increasingly larger nuclear power plants,” Alaniit added.
Data shared on the Internet also creates a security risk. Alaniit recommends deleting all online accounts that are no longer used and organizing your media material such as pictures and videos. You should also delete junk mail. “You can always save the most important data, such as family photos, on an external hard drive, because a storage medium standing on a shelf does not consume electricity and therefore does not generate digital waste,” he advised.
In Järva Municipality schools, GreenDice will focus on making students smarter in the digital world. Internet security and avoiding digital waste go hand in hand. “So if after half a year the children start sharing lessons on this topic at home, it is worth listening to them, because otherwise our monthly electricity bills will continue to rise rapidly and we will have to build more and more wind farms and other power plants as a society,” said Alaniit.
