It's not that easy being green!

Top tips to make our digital learning more environmentally sustainable

We often think of digital learning as the ‘green’ option, involving less printing and less travelling to help shrink our carbon footprint. However it might surprise you to know that the internet actually produces more carbon emissions every year than the whole of the United Kingdom!

So is digital always the sustainable choice for learning?

Sustainable energy, an off-shore windfarm. (AI generated image)

What is sustainability?

The Brundtland report defined sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without comprising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.” This can be broken down into three pillars of sustainability:

• Environmental - protecting the environment and preserving natural resources

• Economic - contributing to development and growth

• Social - promoting equality and respecting individual rights

For this article, we’re going to specifically look at carbon emissions, but it is important to remember that sustainability is bigger than just that!

How does sustainability apply to digital learning?

Creating and running the infrastructures needed to run the web use a lot of natural resources. Data centres use a huge amount of land, lots of water to keep their equipment cool, and lots of electricity. They also have back-up generators to ensure your website never goes down, which often run on non-renewable fuels such as diesel. Global and national repeaters are needed all around the world to get the data from these huge centres to the phone in your hand, and these need all the same resources.

Then we need to think about the devices we use with our learners at access our digital resources. Our computers, phones, projectors and other tech need a variety of different rare raw materials in production, with mobiles being particularly damaging as they generally have very short lives of 2-5 years.

The IT industry greenhouse gas emissions are predicted to make up 14% of global emissions by 2040. For comparison, the aviation industry is responsible for just 2%.

Digital learning has a carbon footprint!

Top tips to minimise our impact

Ask big questions

Whilst we have little control over the environmental actions of the tech giants, we can demand improvements through consumer choice. Ask the big questions to find hosting which uses clean electricity, with data centres located in areas with low carbon energy. Where possible, choose servers that are geographically close to your expected user base or use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) if you have a highly global outreach to move your assets closer to your learners.

Support older tech

If you’re designing resources to be used on learners own devices. Desktop computers have a smaller environmental impact than mobiles as they cost less in production and are usually kept a lot longer. Older and wider ranges of devices are great for inclusivity and accessibility, but also means we aren’t forcing learners to throw away functional devices in favour of new tech just to access our resources!

Reduce the data

By minimising the data you store online you can speed up access to your resources, but it also means that it takes less electricity to store and serve. Do you really need to keep all those back-ups? Do you need all those years of analytic data? Have you compressed every image on the page? Clearing the server a bit also makes it cheaper for you! Also try reducing the amount of emails you need to send - our average yearly email usage has been estimated to the equivalent emissions of driving 128 miles in a small petrol car.

Turn things off.

Even if your digital learning doesn’t require internet access, you can still work to make it more sustainable by ensuring that you turn all devices, from tablets to projectors, off when not in use and unplug everything at the end of every day. Reducing ‘vampire energy’ which is taken by powered down devices left plugged in could save up to 40% of your monthly energy use.

Be honest and transparent

Tell people inside your organisation and outside where you are on your journey to improve your carbon footprint. There are some great tools like the website carbon calculator to measure, offset and share the emissions created by your digital learning. To really make a difference, we will need to collaborate on a mass scale. Openness allows us to share learnings and makes important information more accessible. Let’s be honest about what we know and don’t know, and what we can and can’t change at the moment, to make it easier for everyone!

If we make some of these small changes, we can make our digital learning greener. And of course digital does have the advantage of limiting travel emissions and cutting down on printing, even though we need to weigh these against the cost of hosting information and powering the devices required.

We need to recognise that sustainability and decarbonisation are not the same. There will be times that it is more sustainable for economic or social reasons to take less green options, and sometimes it can be argued that the increased accessibility offered by digital learning to support different needs, languages and time-zones, still makes digital the more sustainable approach for the needs of future generations.