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Send an email, watch a video on your phone, do a search on the internet ... All these activities have an impact on the environment. According to the think tank The Shift Project, digital pollutes even more than air transport. Discover, in computer graphics, the key figures of a pollution far from being virtual.
If the internet were a country, it would be the third largest consumer of electricity, behind China and the United States. A surprising finding, both the impact of digital on the environment is unknown. Today, however, it emits 4% of the world's greenhouse gases, more than civil aviation, according to the think tank The Shift Project in its report released last July.
" The production phase of the devices is very greedy for energy [electricity, oil, etc.] For example, for a smartphone, 90% of greenhouse gas emissions take place during the production phase ," explains Maxime Efoui. Hess, project manager on digital issues at The Shift Project and co-author of the study. "We had to extract the raw materials, it is done with trucks in mines. Materials must then be transformed, and these physical processes are greedy for energy and raw material . "
In addition to manufacturing devices, data centers (servers and computers used to store and transmit data) and network infrastructures (4G antennas, fiber optics, etc.) are also energy-intensive. " We want to have access to our data anytime, anywhere in the world. These data centers must therefore be interconnected and remain accessible 24 hours a day, every day, "explains Maxime Efoui-Hess. For users, solutions exist to reduce the impact on the environment: lower the resolution of videos, disable automatic playback of videos, prefer wifi to mobile networks (which consume more energy).
To understand the issues, find in this infographic, the key figures of digital pollution.
►Our long format: An ocean of cables, in the depths of the internet