Calculating Our Digital Carbon Footprint

As an online company, a significant amount of our carbon emissions are created “online”. The internet contributes to between 2% and 3.7% of global emissions (ClimateCare),(wholegraindigital.com). A report by Gartner, estimates that PCs and monitors account for around 0.8 percent of global CO2 emissions (the Guardian).  

The difficulty for many businesses now operating online with staff working remotely, is how to effectively calculate their digital carbon emissions. The carbon emission figures for our digital footprint vary - in some cases drastically. 

This is largely due to what emissions are taken into consideration when doing the figures: direct or indirect, and whether they are under the company’s control. 

How to Calculate Digital Carbon Footprint

Scope 1 and 2 of emission calculations are such things as; our own company facilities, vehicles, electricity and heating used. For IT or consulting companies Scope 1 and 2 could be quite low, while most of their emissions fall within Scope 3 (indirect emissions): estimated from 75% to 85%. (Vlinder). 

Scope 3 emission calculations are energy used indirectly, for example, upstream: purchased goods and services and downstream: leased assets, franchises, processing of sold products etc.

Our digital footprint needs to factor in our communications online. Each email sent generates between 0.3 and 4 grams of CO2 and with attachments approximately 50 grams.

Each website search generates 6 grams and one hour of online meetings is estimated to generate 282 grams of CO2.

Ways to Reduce Digital Carbon Footprint

There are simple behavioural changes we can make to our online habits to reduce our carbon footprint. For example: 

• Unsubscribe from email newsletters and notifications that no longer interest you.
• Limit your “reply all’s”, avoid sending long email chains – delete what is not relevant, not “cc”ing people who do not need to read the emails.
• Using renewable-powered cloud services, green webhost providers etc.

We are all guilty of a few of these online, energy-wasting habits. Making small positive changes will add up to big energy savings. 

The less unnecessary emails and files we are sending and storing means - less energy used by data centres to transmit and store our unwanted files. 

Here are a few more tips: 

• Send links to files that you already have stored in the cloud -rather than attaching copies of them to emails
• Use bookmarks to avoid searching for articles that you wish to revisit
• Download rather than stream
• Clean out unused files from cloud storage drives and websites.

It all comes down to measuring our use as accurately as possible, observing our habits, implementing changes to our behaviour and monitoring these changes to make sure that we are reducing our digital footprint.

Want to contribute to making this world a little bit greener? Read our free guide on How to Reduce Carbon Emissions and Save Money. 

References: 
A company’s carbon footprint: What are Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions? | by Vlinder | Vlinder | Medium

Scope3_Calculation_Guidance_0.pdf (ghgprotocol.org)

Calculation Tools | Greenhouse Gas Protocol (ghgprotocol.org)