Trying to reduce environmental impact of my internet usage for 14 days

We are used to see Internet as a tool for making our lives greener as it allows us to shop online instead of driving to a store, work with less paper and etc. However, have you ever thought how useless browsing, tweeting and commenting can affect the environment? It may sound pretty harmless, but behind every website there is a physical server that processes all the data and produces emissions.

In 2009, a Harvard physicist found that while one search is insignificant on its own, calculating the overall effect is, in fact, worthwhile. These are some of his findings:

“Twenty milligrams of CO2 are generated every second that someone is using a simple website. As a comparison, an air-freighted orange generates one million milligrams of carbon. So it’s not much right? Well, there are 35 billion minutes logged online every month from users worldwide.”

On Innovation Studio class we raise a number of world problems and sustainability is one of them. As a task for practicing bodystorming technique we were given a challenge and mine was to reduce internet usage to 1h a day.

Now it’s an evening of the third day without web and probably I’ll upload this post tomorrow morning as I already have used up my daily limit.

As a former computer engineering student I admit that I have a small addiction about all the tech devices around me. Everyday you will probably find a laptop, a smartphone, two pairs of headphones, a power bank and smartwatches in my backpack, but all of them are just information transmitters so they are pretty useless without internet connection. I gave up on the source of information 3 days ago, I disconnected myself from the world for 23 hours a day, which wasn’t easy, because I am an international student who just moved to Milan and still feels a bit lost and lonely. Having all my friends and family on a touch of a screen made me feel much better. However I am noticing some positive changes in my behavior. Now I am more focused on the moment and I don’t always have a feeling that somebody’s waiting for my response in a messenger, yesterday I went to university library to get books for my studies instead of browsing all the information online.

So these are some positive changes and I hope that this experience will help me to be more aware about my digital info consumption and will reduce CO2 emissions from servers at least for 1 gram.