3 eco-friendly good practices easy to adopt in order to preserve our planet

This article will be simple and aims at sharing some eco-friendly good practices that we put in place at Digimind thanks to our CSR advocates team!

Digital has become an important part of our lives, and it has a significant impact on the environment.

Every day, we use a massive amount of data which leads to a saturation of servers that are very energy-consuming. Did you know that 1.7 Mb of data is consumed every second by each human on the planet (you can easily find out online what can be done with 1Mb)? As for digital, it represents 4% of greenhouse gas emissions (according to ADEME).

If you don't take change by the hand, it will take you by the throat, once said Winston Churchill. So in terms of digital, what small and easy eco-gestures can we adopt at work and at home in order to preserve our planet and our future?

#1 : Reduce energy consumption of your devices:

Laptops, phones, small and big appliances, all these devices are very energy-consuming, so here are a few eco-friendly practices to diminish your impact :

• Turn off all data consuming apps and features (Wifi, Bluetooth) when not used
• Enable dark mode on your screens
• Activate energy saving mode on your phone
• Empty trash on your laptop
• Turn off your laptop instead of sleep mode
• Unplug your devices when charged
• Unplug as much appliance as you can when not used (lamps, chargers, kettle etc)
• Unplug as much appliance as you can when you leave on vacation (TV, box etc)

#2 : Surf light:

One single digital data travels on average 15.000 km, that's a lot of greenhouse gas emissions too! Here's a few more good practices when it comes to navigation :

• When needed, better use Wifi rather than mobile networks (less impacting)
• Streaming : streaming represents 60% of Internet bandwidth, and Netflix counts for 15%. From now on, dear Netflix, we love you but we need to take a bit of distance, it's not you, it's us, we have something else.. (read, cook, exercise, make puzzles!). Then come music, pictures, web pages and emails.
• Delete emails, cookies, temporary files and navigation history as much as possible
• If you don't read them, unsubscribe from newsletters and communications 
• Limit the number of opened tabs
• Directly target websites when you know them instead of using search engines

#3 Print less and better print

If you really cannot not print, then go for a two-sided printing, black and white (it's black, it's white woo). Do we still need to go through this one? :)

Of course most of these examples seem obvious. But that's relatively a lot to have in mind, and our brains too are filled with a huge quantity of information. So the best piece of advice we could share with you is step by step introducing new habits in your daily life to make a difference, because every tiny action matters. Remember, just like Betty Reese said, if you think you're too small to be effective, you've never been in the dark with a mosquito.

Cheers!