Greenify Your Office’s Digital Carbon Footprint

What is a Digital Carbon Footprint?

A digital carbon footprint is the impact our digital activities have on the environment.

You may not think about it very often, but our computers and other technology systems are constantly using energy to function. Whether it is directly consumed from powering the device or by utilizing a cloud service, this energy consumption impacts the environment (and many times your energy bill!).

It’s typical to hear that you should “go paperless” to reduce your office’s carbon footprint. This is a great way to reduce your paper usage and waste wherever you can. However, sometimes paper documents are necessary and it’s worthwhile to consider how our electronics contribute to our carbon footprint. Below, we offer 4 great habits to greenify your electronic device usage.

1. Unplug your Devices to Save Energy

Unplug chargers and other corded electronics when you are not using them, even if they are powered off! Since electricity continuously runs to working outlets, keeping a device or charger plugged in still consumes energy. This is also known as “vampire” or “standby” power usage.

Make things simpler for yourself (and your cable management) and utilize power strips to easily cut power to your devices and appliances. Create a habit of scanning your office space and hitting that power switch “off” before you leave for the day!

2. Computer Care to Reduce Environmental Impact

There are many ways to reduce your computer’s energy usage while also improving the longevity of its hardware. Not only will this reduce your impact on the environment, but you will reap the benefits of longer battery life for your laptop!

Whenever you are finished using your computer or any other electronic device (like that sweet stereo system), it is important to completely shut it down. Unless you have set a custom configuration, closing your laptop screen puts the device into “sleep” mode. Contrary to the term, a computer in sleep mode is still powered on, waiting for you to “wake” it up.

You can also set your device settings to power usage modes for more efficient energy usage.

Lowering the brightness conserves your battery.

 Utilizing “balanced” mode optimizes your device’s power usage and performance while “best power efficiency” mode optimizes energy consumption at the cost of performance.

Battery saver extends battery life by limiting the background activities of your device. You can also track your battery usage here.  

3. Digital and Site Health – Save Yourself on the Electric Bill

Online service providers need to maintain server facilities in order to operate. These facilities use a great deal of energy to support our online activity, especially video streaming. Close out of any online services when you are finished in spite of the temptation to let your streaming service run all day for background noise. The more data we transfer or stream, the more energy is consumed.

Data centers around the world run continuously to provide our online services.

Site health is also important to consider if you are managing your business online. As you upload more content onto your site, load times can increase and slower website performance or crashes can occur. Regularly running website performance audits can help you detect issues that are causing the server and your clients to consume more resources. Find any issues with your site? We can help you mitigate website errors and improve performance!

4. The Gold Standard of Power Supplies

If you are building a computer yourself, or even browsing to buy a prebuilt one, then you want to consider the power supply for the required computing resources. Power supplies have different ratings of energy efficiency (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and even Titanium now!), so go for at least a Gold standard rated one. The higher efficiency rating means that less of the energy used is converted to heat. This also helps protect your internal components for longer hardware life.

Have devices running 24/7? Antemodal offers consultations to help you select the right equipment for your business.

Finishing Touches on Reducing your Digital Carbon Footprint

These are just a few of the habits you can adopt to reduce your digital carbon footprint. Want to take your efforts further? We can help you digitally transform your business to reduce wasted resources such as paper and energy!

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