The surprising carbon cost of our digital world
Various teams across the Trust have changed their processes in order to reduce their paper use. From digitising treatment escalation forms to exploring the digital alternatives to paper-heavy training booklets in Pharmacy, UHP is striving for a paper-free future. Where paper needs to be used, teams use recycled paper and encourage their manufacturers to do the same.
In the overall life cycle assessment, virgin paper emits 30% more greenhouse gas than recycled pulp paper, and production of 1 kg virgin pulp paper releases 568kg more GHGs into the atmosphere than recycled paper. Whilst recycled paper is better for the environment than virgin paper, its production requires a great deal of thermal and electrical energy- reducing paper altogether is a much more impactful way to cut paper-related CO2 emissions.
In fact, reducing digital activity can have a positive environmental effect too. The below table sourced from the Carbon Literacy website demonstrates the CO2 associated with sending emails of varying size:
|
Email Type |
CO2e |
|---|---|
|
Spam email picked up by your filters |
0.03 g |
|
Short email sent and received on a phone |
0.2 g |
|
Short email sent and received on a laptop |
0.3 g |
|
Long email that takes 10 minutes to write and 3 minutes to read sent and received on a laptop |
17 g |
|
Email blast that takes 10 minutes to write and sent to 100 people, of whom 1 reads it and the other 99 glance at it for 3 seconds to decide that they should ignore it |
26 g |
Why not consider popping this message on your signature to avoid receiving unnecessary emails: Each UK adult sending one fewer unnecessary email per day would reduce carbon emissions by 16,433 tonnes per year. Please accept my "thank you" in advance
Mike Berners-Lee, the author of How Bad Are Bananas, estimated in 2019 that globally emails could account for as much as 150m tonnes CO2e, or about 0.3% of the world’s carbon footprint. That is based on around half of all emails sent being spam and the remainder being reasonably useful messages that took the sender 3 minutes to write and the reader about 1 minute to read. On that basis, average email usage is equivalent to driving a small petrol car for around 128 miles. Why not unsubscribe from those emails you never read to cut your digital footprint a little more?
Teams and Zoom meetings also carry their own carbon cost: A weekly team meeting with six participants, watching in HD 1080p for one hour, releases 0.05kg of CO2. Over a year, this would add up to 2.68kg, equivalent to driving 9.36 miles! Generally speaking, the CO2 emissions increase with video quality, number of participants and length of meeting. One study in 2021 found that turning your camera off in online meetings could reduce your carbon footprint by 96%!
Clearly, whilst the digital world is not without a carbon cost, online meetings save us a great deal of CO2 emissions due to reduced travel. But small changes to our digital habits could help the planet even more.
For more information, contact the sustainability team at plh-tr.sustainability@nhs.net
