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Cleaning up your digital (and carbon) footprint, and how to opt out of junk mail.
Dear Reader,
With news of the UK government asking citizens to delete old emails to save water in the midst of a drought, editor Michaela Keil recently told her Bluedot Brooklyn readers about an e-trash project she was undertaking, writing:
“Last year, I began a project to try to clean up my digital dumpster. Beyond my 100 gigabytes of photos in Google Photos, I had posted thousands of photos on Instagram and Facebook (back when Facebook albums were the thing to post).
That 100 gigabytes in Google Drive translates to about 0.2 tonnes of carbon emissions every year. By comparison, one estimate suggests that asking ChatGPT 10 questions per day for a whole year would result in about half as many emissions as storing 100 gigabytes of data. That’s a lot of waste for all those accidental screenshots.”
She went on to note that, “Saving data in the cloud takes about a million times more energy than saving it to a personal hard drive. While there are some drawbacks to an external hard drive, the limited storage capacity can help you keep your digital dumpster a bit neater.” So … to clean up her e-footprint, Michael wrote that she’s “been setting aside 10 minutes most evenings to go through my photos and delete the ones I don’t need. My goal is to eventually clean up my Google Photos enough that I can download my data, move it onto my external hard drive, and remove it from the cloud. Then it won’t passively consume energy. Plus, I’ll save $1.99 a month for (seemingly) the rest of my life.”
But that’s not all Michaela is doing. While she no longer posts on most of her social media accounts, she says that they live as something of “a time capsule for my teenage self.” (Michaela is clearly a lot younger than Dot. A teenage Dot is lucky to have a time capsule of grainy Polaroids.) To preserve that time capsule, Michaela wrote, “I am scrapbooking my profiles by screenshotting my posts and stories and laying them out in a book. Once I’m finished, I want to print the books and put them next to my high school yearbook for reference when I’m feeling nostalgic.”
Then she plans to delete the profiles and request that the companies delete her data.
She concluded, “By the end, I want to see data as something that I am saving intentionally, Marie Kondo–style. If it doesn’t spark joy, if I don’t have a need to go back to it, or if I’m only saving it for later because I feel like I should (and not because I want to), then maybe it’s not worth storing after all.”
Does deleting emails really do much to save water (or energy)? Most experts note that reining in the expansion of massive data centers would do a lot more. Nonetheless, in the spirit of every-little-bit-helps, Michaela’s thoughtful approach to curating her online presence is a worthwhile start.
Intentionally,
Dot
Remove your name from mailing lists using Epsilon’s website and unsubscribe from unwanted catalogs online at CatalogChoice.org to reduce the amount of junk in your mailbox. And Dot tells you how to stop junk mail and catalogs.
For more Bluedot Climate Quick Tips, click here.
