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When the time comes to measure our greenhouse gas emissions, we often think of very concrete industries, such as transport, oil extraction or even agriculture. But what about sectors whose production is intangible, such as digital technologies?
Camille Péloquin asks us: The technologies necessary for data conservation contribute to global warming, but on what scale?
According to the Ecological Transition Agency, a French government body, the digital world (the downloading, storage and sharing of data on the Internet) alone produces 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. A weight that is set to grow even more given the increasingly important role that connected activities take in our lives.
It is estimated that sending a single email generates between 4 and 50 grams of CO2. When we consider that 4 billion humans have email inboxes and that they exchange around 300 billion emails every day, the environmental impact of all these messages is dizzying.
But be careful, not all emails are equal. The variables that influence their carbon footprint are numerous.
Do they contain attachments? The larger they are, the more energy they require to move from one box to another.
Are they sent from a computer or a smartphone? Wired and wifi networks require less energy than mobile data, and 5G technology less than 4G.
And above all, what is the source of supply for your electricity network? Hydroelectricity or thermal power plant?
“If all the elements needed to send an email or listen to a stream are in Quebec, which uses hydroelectricity, the impact is less significant than if it happened in Alberta or the United States, where thermal power plants are used,” illustrates Daria Marchenko, founder of Ecoist Club, an organization that advises companies on digital sobriety.
However, there is no guarantee that an email sent from Quebec will not pass through other, more polluting servers elsewhere in the world, explains Daria Marchenko.
“The companies that manage our data apply the principle of redundancy, that is, our data is copied to several different data centers to ensure continuity in the event of a service outage in certain locations. »
Other variables
Email is far from the only use of the Internet that requires large amounts of energy. Continuous viewing (streaming) of videos on platforms like YouTube or Netflix is very energy intensive and accounts for up to 60% of traffic on the Web according to some estimates.
The place of email in the environmental portrait of digital technologies must therefore be put into perspective.
Rather than embarking on a race to eliminate emails, Daria Marchenko therefore encourages us to take into account the entire life cycle of electronic devices, from the extraction of the resources necessary for their design until their end of life, including the energy they use for their operation.
The fight against planned obsolescence, by extending the lifespan of devices, can have a great impact on the environmental footprint of the digital sector. Just like consumer behavior towards an industry which is constantly offering new models and ever-increasing quantities of data.
“We are caught in a somewhat schizophrenic world: on the one hand, we try to limit our consumption, and on the other, we are constantly pushed to buy new devices and replace phones that still work. We must be more than consumers, or “consumer-actors”, capable of refusing new offers,” believes Daria Marchenko.