It wasn’t always known as the Valley of Pimps and Pushers. Once upon a time, they called it the Valley of Heart’s Delight. From far and near, families would come on Springtime pilgrimages to participate in the famed “blossom tours” in Santa Clara Valley, California. “Miles and mi … | Continue reading
That silicon stuff. Sand, right? Right. It takes coal and charcoal, multiple metals and materials, and over 400 toxic chemicals, to make a silicon chip—the foundation of everything that happens in clean tech. “The environmental impact of chip making is huge,” Ian Williams, profes … | Continue reading
They like their chips well engineered in the USA. Long, straight and thin. Good looking. To get such handsome chips requires large, round, smooth potatoes, and to grow such potatoes requires soft, loamy, sandy soil. Such soil is thirsty. In such thirsty soil, water seeps through … | Continue reading
We’ve never had more data and yet we’ve never had less information architecture skill. Organizations don’t want to invest in the hard and vital work of professionally organizing and managing data. AI is making things worse because it is feeding the idea that humans no longer need … | Continue reading
It’s not simply crap content. Computer code bloat is everywhere. For starters, most software, most features, serve no useful function. A pile of crap software is launched and then either it dies a death, or else for years badly designed fixes are made to try to get it to work in … | Continue reading
We need to talk about data. Crap data. We’re destroying our environment to create and store trillions of blurred photos and cat videos, binge watch Netflix, and ask ChatGPT inane questions and get instant wrong answers. We’re destroying our environment to store copies of copies o … | Continue reading
As soon as Lars Ruiter stepped out of his car, he was confronted by a Microsoft security guard seething with anger, Morgan Meaker recounted for Wired. Ruiter, a local Dutch councilor, had parked in the rain outside a half-finished Microsoft data center that rose out of the flat N … | Continue reading
You do not want to live close to a data center. Having one near your home is like having a lawn mower running in your living room 24/7, as one local resident described it. Residents talked about low-pitched roars interspersed with high-frequency screeches, as the whir of loud fan … | Continue reading
Like Moore’s Law, energy efficiency for data centers began to run out of steam by the 2010s. After substantial progress between 2007 and 2018, the energy efficiency didn’t actually improve much between 2018 and 2024. It didn’t stop the PR spin about how Big Tech is so efficient a … | Continue reading
For years, energy efficiency was the great big shining bright green fabulously good spinning story of the Big Tech data center love of and care for the environment. This was quite a feat of PR spinning, when you consider that a small area of a data center in the 2020s had more po … | Continue reading
The data centers were coming. Rural Washington, USA, was going to be transformed. There would be so many jobs, so many jobs. Making Rural Washington Great Again. All it required was cheap land, cheap water, cheap electricity, and huge tax breaks. The data centers came. Where were … | Continue reading
In some ways, a data center moving into a community is like a prison setting up. Super-high security, ugly warehouse buildings. In other ways, a data center is much worse than a prison. A prison will bring some jobs; data centers bring hardly any jobs. What’s more, a data center … | Continue reading
Morals matter. Ethics matter. Character matters. Bad people create bad societies. AI culture, like Big Tech culture, is riddled with fast and greedy characters. AI is the latest bitcoin, the latest blockchain. It is the latest way scammers, con artists and grifters think they can … | Continue reading
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