In my last post I described how I have started to think about how to make my work more environmentally sustainable, and described the practical steps I am taking to achieve this, starting with decreasing my digital footprint. Thanks to everyone who got in touch with comments and tips digital sustainability (I’ve updated the original post now to include these).
This is part 2, in which I want to talk about the material, physical stuff and how I am tackling that. As before, I found this post really inspiring and I have taken some of the tips to foster digital sustainability and applied them to my own context.
Reducing digital waste
This is probably the aspect of digital sustainability that I find the easiest to implement. Having worked for most of my career in the for sector has accustomed me to purchasing technology with longevity in mind, and my current laptop is a Chromebook that is nearly ten years old and still going strong. Likewise, my last phone was 9 years old when I replaced it. I like living with my devices and I have translated that ethos straight into my own business. Like many families we share older devices amongst older and younger users, extending the lifespan of each before it gets recycled.
I also find my analogue tech, like a watch or a record player for instance, contribute to the longevity of using technologies, and wherever possible I tend to buy things like digital games, books or music outright or borrow them from the public library so that I am not reliant on subscription services as much. That applies to work-related digital content, too.
In general, I try to follow the “reduce, re-use, recycle” approach familiar from general recycling and apply the same logic to digital waste and consumption.
A note on purchasing
As I have written about previously, I try to make good decisions about where I spend money, for example by doing less shopping online and switching how and where I get (audio)books from. When it comes to work-related purchasing, I try to choose independent hosting companies or purchase open source software that supports community development such as Fission and AudioHijack. Small choices, that ultimately add up to much of my purchasing over the course of the year. It’s not always possible to find alternatives to mainstream or big tech products, but more and more often it is.
Energy Efficiency
Energy efficiency was next on my radar. As I have explained in part 1, I have worked hard to reduce my digital footprint and space in the cloud already, and that helps to minimise needless energy required for hosting and storage. I also found other tips such as using energy saving modes or switching off devices when appropriate, helpful. I use less energy and since last year we have solar panels on the roof, which helps enormously. We are lucky that this is an option for us, and I am grateful that it is especially in times when energy provision and pricing is so volatile.
I also continue to stick to my audio-first preference over video, in most of my work and for my podcast. Although many podcasts have moved over to video and there is a huge push in that direction, I am not planning to do so. I prefer audio as a format in any case, but it is also much more digitally sustainable from the production process to promotion and distribution. I don’t want folk listening to my podcast to have to download or stream 30-60 min of video each time. It’s to my detriment in terms of listener numbers as many podcast platforms push video podcasts more than audio only, but I feel it’s a trade-off I am willing to make. My podcast is a passion project without a commercial angle, and I want its digital footprint to be as light as possible whilst making the most of the medium.
In a similar way as I prefer audio to video, I have turned off AI-powered search by default, enabling me to search on the web without utilising an unnecessary amount of energy. It’s a tiny gesture in the larger lifecycle of AI tools or agents but it is a relatively easy step to take (and nearly all of my search queries work perfectly well with traditional search).
Just add -AI to any search query removes AI-generated overviews and reverts to a more traditional set of results. It works across Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo and removes the need to install a specific plug-in or browser extension (thanks to this AI report for the tip!).
I also found this https://huggingface.co/spaces/AIEnergyScore/Leaderboard a very helpful starting point for comparing different models in terms of energy consumption.
Overall, how are things going when it comes to reducing digital waste and increasing energy efficiency? Progress score: 6/10 (by which I mean I feel I have done about 60% of the things I am aware of and able to do).
Next up on my journey to greater sustainability is not what I do, but how I work, and adopting more digitally sustainable working habits. More on those in the next post.