It’s not just the Heads of State, meeting at the 2015 Paris conference on climate change, COP21, who can do something about CO2 emissions. Here are three practical solutions to help safeguard the planet on a daily basis by becoming smart digital technology users.
While ICTs can help reduce the carbon footprint in some ways, in other respects their use causes greenhouse gas emissions. But there are some very simple steps to limit this.
- Emptying your mailbox: The emails that pile up in our mailboxes, both private and professional, are not just virtual messages. They actually ‘exist’ on the servers that host them and the volume they take up uses electricity. In France, the telecom operator Orange has calculated that if everyone in the country deleted 50 old or unwanted emails, this simple gesture would save enough power to light the Eiffel Tower for 24 years or 1.6 billion energy-efficient bulbs for one hour!
- Storing more locally: The cloud offers a host of advantages. However, as is the case with emails kept on remote servers, the remote storage of files from our digital lives (photos, videos, documents, etc.), increases the environmental burden of the cloud. Now, according to the GreenIT.fr website, carrying a data item via the internet uses twice as much energy as storing it for one year.
- Managing smartphones intelligently: Almost everyone has a smartphone in their pocket these days (some professional users even have several). Simple solutions here can also extend the operating life (and therefore reduce battery recharges) and minimise the carbon footprint of a smartphone (or a tablet): reduce the brightness, switch to standby mode more quickly, delete pointless messages, close background applications or quite simply choose ‘power saving mode’ if the device has this.
The Brussels-Capital Region prefers Green IT
?In its ‘Buying Green!’ handbook, the European Commission points out that if all the public authorities across the EU were to acquire more energy-efficient computers, this would result in a saving of 830,000 tonnes of CO2!
In the Brussels-Capital Region, the public authorities are therefore also playing the green card in ICT. This is true of the Brussels Regional Informatics Centre (BRIC), which provides equipment and peripherals for a great many authorities in the Region, as well as at local level. For this service, the BRIC opts for sustainable purchases and has included environmental clauses in our public procurement contracts. Brussels Environment has welcome this green buying policy adopted by the BRIC for the Region as a whole (PDF - French, 205 kB).
