Memes, reply-all emails, and the thousands of photos stored on our phones usually capture our attention briefly and are quickly forgotten. But in terms of energy, they last a very long time. Ian Hodgkinson, professor of strategy at Loughborough University, said: GuardianHis recent work on junk data focuses on the tiny amounts of data we accumulate and how it impacts climate change. While things like email and digital photos are widely thought of as carbon neutral, “any data, whether it’s an image or an Instagram post, has a carbon footprint,” he says.
Hodgkinson found that companies store a ton of junk data, 68% of which is never used again; the figures would be roughly comparable for personal data usage. Storing all this data accumulates in data centers, which, as the moniker “the cloud” (where much of our digital footprint is stored) implies, are “incredibly hot, incredibly noisy” and “consume huge amounts of energy,” he said. For businesses, Hodgkinson and his colleague Tom Jackson wrote in the World Economic Forum, data centers are comparable to the airline industry. “Today, businesses are generating 1.3 billion gigabytes of dark data a day,” he noted, adding, “That’s the equivalent of 3,023,255 flights from London to New York.”
Tech companies that charge for cloud storage have an economic incentive to store a pile of junk data, but the costs are damaging to the environment. According to Data Center Dynamics, the amount of energy used by U.S. data centers is expected to double by 2030. A major driver is the use of artificial intelligence. Hodgkinson believes that changing how we think about data, from something that weighs and is invisible to the amount of carbon it takes to maintain (4 grams, or 0.14 ounces, per email), can change our habits. “It’s not like one photo is going to make a dramatic difference,” he says. “But of course, if you open your phone and look at all the photos you have of your past, that makes a pretty big impression in terms of energy consumption.” (Google’s emissions targets are now in jeopardy because of AI.)
