According to a report by ADEME , excessive use of digital devices is responsible for 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions and this share is likely to double by 2025. Invisible, the digital that we use massively on a daily basis nevertheless consumes extremely polluting and energy-intensive resources in order to operate continuously. How can companies communicate while limiting their impact on the planet? Which is the most ecological tool: SMS, email, or instant messaging applications? We take stock. What is digital pollution? Without realizing it, we pollute every day. When we turn on our computer or when we communicate with our colleagues or friends via the web and/or our smartphones, we pollute.
Sending messages, whether by email, SMS or via an instant messaging application such as WhatsApp, is not trivial. This type of action has consequences on the environment . Indeed, it takes a lot of energy to operate the connected devices that manage and transport data. This energy consumption emits significant amounts of CO2 . According to ADEME, although digital technologies facilitate our daily activities and communication, the pollution generated by the traffic of this data , which continues to increase (+25% per year), has a considerable impact on our lives and the environment.
8 to 10 billion emails (excluding spam) are exchanged every hour and 180 million searches are carried out on Google. Each of these actions emits greenhouse gases, which are harmful to the environment. Digital pollution therefore results from the use of new technologies that we make of them every day. Also read: Online commerce: why and how to dematerialize my uk telegram database business? Which communication tool pollutes the least? According to the analyses of researcher Mike Berners-Lee, author of the book How bad are bananas? on the environmental footprint of everyday products, sending an email, a text message or a communication via an instant messaging application does not have the same impact on the environment. Emails According to the data collected by the researcher, emails are the most polluting .
The carbon emissions of an email vary depending on its content: from 0.3 g of CO2 for spam to 4 g for a classic email and up to 50 g of CO2 for an email containing a photo or a large attachment. Indeed, according to the ADEME report, the impact of sending an email depends on the weight of the attachments, the storage time on a server, but also the number of recipients. Sending the same email to 10 recipients multiplies CO2 emissions by 4. Instant messaging applications Sending a message via a messaging application such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger would be almost as polluting as sending an email . There is no precise data to estimate their carbon footprint. However, these data flows use the Internet, just like emails, so their carbon footprint should be close to it. It also depends on the content that is sent through these instant messaging apps. The more content there is other than plain text (GIFs, emojis and images), the bigger the carbon footprint.
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