Digital Pollution

Digital Pollution 

Hello, I am Harmit Anadkat; today’s topic of mine is Digital Pollution.

Let’s get started with……
As nowadays we are spending much of our time in surfing through Internet for any problem and that’s genuine as due to digitalization of information it is not wrong to resist it. In one click we can explore from different parts of one country to another by surfing, by chatting with our far of relatives, by watching some movies or web-series in this lockdown which is casual routine for most of our youth’s, but the issue comes with what gets impacted by these habits of our, and that serious issue is not at all less the creating water/soil/land/noise pollution; and that issue is Digital Pollution.

 

So, what is Digital pollution?
Whenever we use internet, at last we leave our digital footprints by scrolling through app, by surfing through a browser, watching video, sending mails, storing data on cloud-based software, transferring data; leaves history of digital footprints in a server.
 You know that 2% of CO2 emission is due to digital pollution and studies show that annually 3% of rise of CO2 emission will be taking place.

So, the first question arises, How this CO2 emission takes place by Digitalization or Digital Pollution? 
So, the servers which handles the day-to-day data transfers need much amount of energy to work efficiently and that energy is 16% of energy which is to be consumed in total energy. The workspace needs to be cooled as the systems gets heated to handle large amount of data transfer, the fact arises is that in an Hour there are almost an average of 12 Billion mails gets transferred from the server to the consumer, which is about using of 4,000 tons of oil in an hour.

Now coming back to “Digitalization era”. The smartphone we use have about 80% of its constituents which are harmful to environment and for a fact, In 2015; 710 million electronic devices were distributed which itself suggest that in consecutive years e-waste is gonna be a problematic situation for us because to dump it, we require space, to transport this waste leads to CO2 emission.

Now, talking about E-waste, In 2015 itself 1.5 million tonnes of e-waste got generated and for a fact it is about 166 times of Eiffel Tower and the dangerous fact is that this E-waste which is collected is within normal garbage, so overall about 1% of E-waste is only recycled

Now the question arises, How to control or minimize this E-waste? 

What steps we should take care of? 

First of all, minimize or let’s say optimize your usage of data on useful tracks. 

Now, follow some steps to go further:

1. Clean Your Mail-Inbox 

2. Just Unsubscribe from newsletter whose mails are not important for you.

3. Try watching Tv instead of Live-Streaming.

4. Minimize usage of Cloud-based storage.

5. Try to use accurate web links.

6. Make bookmarks of website which you visit usually. 

7. Try sending E-mails with summary itself. 

8. Compress files while sending.

9. Try using Pen-drive for data-transfer. 

10. Remove unused apps from device. (fact: Normally people have at least 9 apps which he uses rarely) 

11. Try to use small-screen device. (fact: Small screen uses less energy) 12. Close those browser window which is not in use while using Internet. 

Thanks to all of you for giving me chance to represent my views on Digital Pollution.