There are lots of simple yet effective steps we can take in order to reduce digital waste. Either as individuals or organizations we can: Reduce the creation of wasteful data or content. Make sure that what we create contains the least waste possible. Make sure that what we creat … | Continue reading
It’s a climate crisis. Everyone can do something to reduce CO2 and other harmful gases and activities, not least Web professionals. Inspired by an excellent UK Council Website Emissions website, I decided to do something similar for Ireland. In the UK, the average council website … | Continue reading
The Internet is the largest system of infrastructure ever created. Moving data across the Internet is a highly complex process, with a lot of hidden environmental costs. Transferring data has many dependencies, according to Tom Greenwood from Wholegrain Digital. “Are you transfer … | Continue reading
Digital has become too much about the creation and collection of content and data. We are flooding the present with so much content that we are diminishing our critical abilities to think, plan and design for the long term. “I think distraction is another key aspect of digital,” … | Continue reading
The Cloud is on the ground. I used to think that digital was immaterial, that sending an email was an act of climate activism, while sending a physical letter was like climate hooliganism. It’s only in the last couple of years that I have come to realize that digital is an accele … | Continue reading
The Website Carbon Calculator is a real go-to tool for me when I want to find out how much CO2 a particular Web page is creating. This, and many other great initiatives, comes from Wholegrain Digital, a company founded by Vineeta and Tom Greenwood in 2007. Tom has recently publis … | Continue reading
Over a wire is the most energy efficient way to transfer data. In a Digital Waste survey, when we asked people if they tried to transfer data (particularly large quantities of data) using wired cable instead of using Wi-Fi, or 3G, 4G or 5G, 62% said no. A German study found that … | Continue reading
If it takes you three minutes to write an email on a smartphone then the total CO2 involved in that exercise could amount to about 1 gram. Writing the same email on a laptop could amount to 5 grams of CO2, while on a desktop it could be as much as 11 grams. The above… Read More » | Continue reading
We’ve been developing a survey to identify wasteful digital behavior. About 180 people completed a test version. There follows a highlight of the most interesting results. 60% of respondents said that it was not easy to find content and other information on their organization’s i … | Continue reading
90% of data does not get used three months after it’s published. 91% of webpages never get found in Google. We have a global content waste industry feverishly producing enormous quantities of really expensive content that is essentially useless, and creating lots of CO2 pollution … | Continue reading
“We still live in a ‘publish and be damned’ world,” Sarah Winters says. “Now, it’s up. Now we can forget about it and move on to the next thing. I’d quite like to see if websites could only have a finite amount of pages, a finite amount of services because then it would be like… … | Continue reading
On the Web, content is indeed critical. If we need more convincing of this statement, we only have to throw a cursory glance at current events. Content is driving the conversation. Content is leading to action. Content is critical. Sarah Winters defined the term ‘content design’ … | Continue reading
It seems that before most people put their tech hat on, they carefully take their brain out. For every one good tech idea, I see at least nine really stupid and unnecessary ones. But most organizations can’t resist more technology. The new website I got built for customercareword … | Continue reading
All “free” systems are wasteful by design because a free system merely hides or displaces its costs. Take for example Google and Facebook. These so-called free services cost the earth. Even as both organizations vigorously participate in greenwashing, saying how they embrace rene … | Continue reading
In the digital fairytale, the evil character is Delete and the hero is Save. Digital heaven is where nothing gets deleted and everything is saved and you never know what you might find if only you look in the right place. Digital designers and particularly software developers hav … | Continue reading
The homepage for my website (customercarewords.com) used to weigh 957 KB. Through a series of design decisions, we were able to bring the size down to 70 KB. With the exact same amount of content. With the exact same visual design. A 93% saving in the CO2 pollution that page crea … | Continue reading
Did you ever wonder how much data you produce? In 2020, it was estimated that 1.7 megabytes of data were created every second for every person on earth. We have created more data in the last two years than in all of previous human history. When Liam Nugent shut down his digital a … | Continue reading
Digital’s easy and cheap creative capabilities trap us in a Cult of Volume. According to digital agency founder, Liam Nugent, “a typical designer or programmer sees their job as to do, to make things. They ‘outsource the thinking’ because it’s a job, because that’s what they’ve b … | Continue reading
If there’s one thing digital has done it is to explode the creation and production of digital stuff. It requires herculean efforts to focus on quality in a digital environment because digital tools are so relentlessly focused on quantity. Digital feeds and accelerates a culture o … | Continue reading
Let’s Green The Web is a five-day Twitter campaign starting this week (Monday 15) to encourage and support everybody to measure the carbon emissions of websites and share tweets highlighting the results. Let’s Green The Web aims to “both encourage, as well as support, those who r … | Continue reading
Modern technology is causing us to lose our capacity to think ahead, to plan, to prioritize, to design with any degree of depth. The Cloud says that we can store and save everything. Google says we don’t have to organize anything. And there’s an app for everything. AI is making u … | Continue reading
Technology is the problem. Our elites have failed us. So much of humanity is Trumpian, invested in global gaslighting, in greedy, narcissistic bling, in climbing the pyramid scheme, in fetishizing the Great Man and dancing to some grand illusion of some glorious past and some ‘pu … | Continue reading
The most sustainable Web design is maintenance. The greatest creativity is reuse. Fixing what you have nearly always reduces waste and increases value more than buying something new. One of the core principles at Netlife, a Norwegian digital design agency, is: “We make what human … | Continue reading
“When I was working for Ruter (a Norwegian public transit company), one of the key principles was that people should travel with us without having to think,” Beth Stensen, CEO of Netlife, a Norwegian digital design agency states. “And I asked why? What’s so bad about thinking? Wh … | Continue reading
How do you work sustainably as a digital professional? If you are a producer of code or content then you are a producer of CO2. How do you ensure your digital activities produce as little CO2 as possible? Better still, how do you ensure that your digital work is useful enough tha … | Continue reading
One of the most important things I’ve learned as a result of observing the voting intentions of some 500,000 people in more than 100 countries is that there are indeed top tasks that are universal. With Toyota we found that there are universal top tasks in relation to how Europea … | Continue reading
Timnit Gebru, a leader and pioneer in the ethics of Artificial Intelligence at Google, was working with colleagues on a new research paper. The paper addressed some of the dangers inherent in the Google approach to AI, including data center energy consumption and the impact on ma … | Continue reading
In 2020 we will create, capture, copy, and consume almost 60 zettabytes of data. By 2025, it will be 200 zettabytes. By 2035, there will be more than 2,000 zettabytes of data in the world. In my interview with data expert Nick Evanson I asked him to calculate how much it would co … | Continue reading
We need good science today more than ever. We need a calm, logical, rigorous, scientific way of thinking and acting. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, science and the scientific community often let society down. We must understand why and what must be done to lessen the chan … | Continue reading
When it comes to making products, the technology industry has a circular economy. It goes to poorer countries and pays them as little as possible for the raw materials. Once the products are old, it dumps the e-waste back in poor countries where it will be ‘recycled’. The recycli … | Continue reading
In the physical world, there are certain speed limits beyond which there is a huge jump in energy requirements and a major jump in dangers for humans. These limits exist in the digital world too. As speed increases, energy demands rise, waste explodes and the likelihood of humans … | Continue reading
Using more and more energy does not lead to more happiness. After a certain point there are diminishing returns. In fact, too much energy leads to obesity in the body and overload in the mind. “The drastic increases in societies’ energy use seen in recent decades have, beyond a c … | Continue reading
Which is more efficient at searching: the human brain or Google? The average Google search takes about .2 seconds to process, consuming about .3 watts per search. The human brain consumes about 20 watts of energy every hour, or .005 watts per second. For a brain to do a “search” … | Continue reading
Humans are not used to abundance. For millions of years, we wanted. A steady supply of food was rarely guaranteed. It is only in the last 100 years that food has become more abundant. We can’t cope. It’s estimated that one-third of food that is bought is wasted. Even much of the … | Continue reading
Albert Speer was one of the few Nazis who reflected on what he did and felt some form of guilt. He was Hitler’s architect, and in the later stages of World War II he took over armaments manufacturing and oversaw tremendous increases in production by bringing in new management tec … | Continue reading
The history of technology is about extending and replacing human energy. We are at a point now where increasing amounts of our energy are going to waste because we are using technology out of convenience and laziness rather than for productive motives. The consequences for oursel … | Continue reading
The fourth principle of Digital Earth Experience design is to “Delete 90%”. The illusion of cheap storage has encouraged by far the worst hoarding habits in human history. We are drowning in digital crap, and it’s going to get much, much worse. Most organizations haven’t even beg … | Continue reading
The first principle is to not create. Not doing anything with digital is the kindest thing you can do for the environment. The decisions that you make not to create that extra piece of code, that extra piece of content, these are the most important decisions you can make. If you … | Continue reading
The greatest challenge we have today both in the physical and digital world is waste. It’s not an energy production problem we have. It’s a waste production problem. The defining characteristic of “rich” world culture is profligate waste. We create, for example, so much plastic w … | Continue reading
“Domination” is Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite word. He illustrates better than most the domineering Tech Bros win-at-all-costs, use-all-means-to-get-to-your-ends approach. From the first time I heard him gush about “community” the hairs on my neck stood up. There was something deepl … | Continue reading
If 50 million websites are actively using Google Analytics, then according to my calculations this could be resulting in 100 million kg of CO2 pollution a year. You’d need to plant 10 million trees to deal with that sort of pollution. Most of these 50 million websites will find o … | Continue reading
The most substantial pollution from Google Analytics comes from the processing and analysis of the data. Let’s assume that the analytics data from each of the 50 million websites using Google Analytics requires 30 seconds per day of processing from Google servers. These servers t … | Continue reading
Every time you access a webpage that is using Google Analytics, about 22 KB of data is sent to Google. If we estimate that there are 500 million pages being accessed every day then that’s about 4 million GB of data per year. We’d need to plant 1,656 trees to deal with the polluti … | Continue reading
The most dangerous cost is the cost closest to zero. The most dangerous concept is cheap. The cost close to zero easily becomes invisible. We don’t see it so we don’t think it exists, and that makes us consume with abandon, that makes us waste at will. That which is cheap—or, wor … | Continue reading
Words: Whether it is text or voice, words are how a digital designer primarily thinks. The best designers spend enough time to choose the right word because the right words drive the right actions. Code: Words without code are print. Without good code there can be no Web and the … | Continue reading
Many organizations have not really adapted to the Web but rather have made the Web adapt to them and their print processes, their print thinking and their print culture. The characteristics of a print culture are: You are creating a fixed, contained, physical thing. It is much mo … | Continue reading
COVID-19 has exposed many organizations as being unable to react quickly enough. When a pandemic has the potential to grow exponentially, decisions that can mitigate against its growth need to be made very quickly. Information that loss of smell was a key symptom for COVID-19 beg … | Continue reading
A unique strength of the Web over all other communications channels is its ability to efficiently collect, analyze, organize and publish user-generated content. The combination of digital technology and the wisdom of the crowds is a powerful, revolutionary force. A perfect exampl … | Continue reading