From the course: Digital Sustainability: How to Reduce Your Digital Footprint

What is digital or invisible waste?

From the course: Digital Sustainability: How to Reduce Your Digital Footprint

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What is digital or invisible waste?

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- Have you ever noticed how frequently you watch and delete photos, videos, or documents that you have stored in your mobile phone, computer, or the cloud? If you are like me, almost never. We normally do not have time or either do not remember to do that, which is worse. We never ever think about it, and without noticing it, we are creating gigs and gigs of digital waste. We understand digital waste as digital asset that no longer serve us or that we no longer use and that we accumulate on the internet and do not delete. This can include emails, social network conversations, data, digital files, photos, and more, which usually remain on service in the cloud and on our devices unless we manually or deliberately delete them. This digital waste is invisible to the human eye outside of electronic devices, and it's just taking up space on devices or servers, consuming electricity and generating a carbon footprint. Creating, processing, and storing digital waste requires a lot of energy, and the use of that energy generates negative emissions for the environment. While the energy required for a single search on the internet or to send an email is small, the amount of activities we carry out online increases year after year, and because so many people are doing the same at the same time, the collective impact is massive. First, because any digital files need processors and servers or cloud storage to be carried out and saved, also because to be carried out, we need physical devices such as cell phones, computers, and screens, which also consume energy. And then, because when we discard those digital devices, we generate a significant amount of physical electronic waste, which again generates our carbon footprint. Now that we know that by storing our digital data creates waste, we can start developing a plan to delete it regularly.

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