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hello and welcome to technically speaking a podcast where scientists and engineers come together to chat about common interests share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity i'm laura and in this episode i'm joined by antonia garlier and anika to talk about the carbon footprint of digital communication and our online presence and offer a point of view on some different types of communication and the impact they have on carbon emissions so to start off with galia tell us one
interesting thing you found out about your digital presence or one oddity you would like to share with us like most people i've tried to become conscious of my carbon footprint and so i debate you know do i use my car or public transport but i never thought about my carbon footprint when i send an email and i read an article talking about you know you can calculate what your carbon footprint is just based on the number of emails you send i mean it makes sense right because you need energy to
sustain your device and there's actually energy required to send the email but i think that i dissociated emails with the wider kind of carbon discussion and i in part that article i read that um that if you send 65 emails it's roughly equivalent to driving one kilometer in a car now i i didn't fact check this but just the fact that you can associate your emails to like driving your car in any way maybe feel like oh dear like i actually do need to think about my carbon
footprint when it comes to my digital like presence i was actually quite shocked and i think we're all sending more emails than ever these days hundred percent i think i get you know that like pavlovian response like when they hear a belt when i hear the outlook i just start getting palpitations it's just constant and because of covid i feel like i have to be extra polite so someone sends me something and i'll just respond with thanks even though this is not necessary at all
but i tried to be kind of extra nice during the during these times yeah i definitely tried to do that because when i started my job i only been there three months before we went into lockdown so most people wouldn't know me so i felt like i had to be really nice an email just so that we could have this connection somehow i hope you're well keep well and safe those are my standard emails so i think i might be one of the more ruder emailers because i've never been to like
why are you starting your off with how are you you clearly aren't that interested because you have another questions asked i also don't tend to say thank you emails maybe i should know or maybe not if that does really increase your carbon footprint saving the planet laura yeah my rudeness is eco-friendly just put on your signature yeah you know in the signature and it says you know think about the environment before you print you can just be like thinking about the environment before you print
or respond i don't like such a gal of jail free card for not replying to so many emails i'm definitely gonna use that uh but then again see i i would actually rather than having a long protracted email conversation i would probably rather pick up the phone it's a lot quicker and you get a lot more meaning because you can hear whether someone's like being sarcastic or whether they're joking or how serious they are about what they're saying from their tone of voice
and i can imagine that using the phone in some instances is actually um more energy efficient or more carbon friendly coining a new term as well carbon friendly i had read a landline not that i have a landline in this house anymore but if i did have one its voltage requirement and the amount of amps it requires are actually pretty low so the total power consumption is way less than a watt so over 24 hours that's a very small fraction of a kilowatt hour cordless phone uses
10 times more than a landline in terms of kilowatt hours i can't really convert that into a carbon footprint because that depends on your energy source but i can imagine that those numbers compare quite favorably to sending multiple emails throughout the day for a two-minute conversation maybe i just hate picking up the phone and speaking to people because i feel like they wanted a response straight away and with an email i'm like hiding behind my screen so it's just
it's easier for me it might be carbon friendly friendlier to ring but um i think for my well-being i still have to write an email that is true you do get more of a chance to think about how you want to respond in an email but i think i overthink it as well because i'm conscious of the fact that people can't hear my tone of voice so then i'm like does that sound sarcastic it's not meant to but does it i don't know i questioned myself anika what about you how do you feel
about your online digital presence and how that is uh related to your carbon footprint in the last year i have watched a lot of videos a lot of pakistani dramas on youtube a lot of netflix so i was really keen to find out what the impact of watching all those videos was on my carbon footprint first of all i found it very hard to get a number so many different sources had so many different numbers but in the end i found a calculator on the international energy authority website to calculate the
carbon footprint of streaming a video for an hour and i chose this just because they've stated what their methodology was and what assumptions they made which a lot of places hadn't so you could find out depending on which country you were from what device you were using what the carbon footprint was for the uk streaming one hour of hd video is 33 grams on a 50-inch led tv but if you use your smartphone that would only be six grams so it was really device um dependent i
found so there were a lot of other factors but the device seemed to have the biggest impact as well as which country you were so like the world average is 67 grams for a 50 inch tv and 12 grams for a smart the uk's a bit lower than that and i guess that's because of our energy mix we fortunately do rely a bit more on renewables than some other places but yeah it varies hugely depending on what device you use and which country my my kind of day-to-day work doesn't
require me to look at carbon numbers a lot and so when i saw things where like grams or kilograms i couldn't quite imagine what that meant i don't know if that's a lot i had no idea to be honest i found it quite hard to like work out how bad i was putting into context is really difficult to me six grams doesn't sound that low carbon and i watch most of my videos on my phone or i have stuff on the background like when i'm working like i might be playing music things
like that and is that bad should i be using a music streaming service instead of having the music videos playing on youtube or a podcast streaming service instead would that be better would it be a matter of grams difference and is is that really the biggest radio instead of the internet as well yeah i do have an old analog radio that's a really good point antonia the average uk person's footprint is about 15 tons per year so six grams that's quite a lot of hours of
streaming isn't it is that more or less hours than there are in a year if i watch videos continuously i can try and do a back of the envelope calculation let's do a back of the envelope conversation i love it science and maths in real time no pressure until i was trying to do this before we started to check some of my numbers and i just massively confused myself and they weren't even difficult calculations i'm just not used to doing maths anymore i think but i think that's one of the
issues as well laura because honestly the numbers vary so much from site to site and i wouldn't be surprised if a it's the assumptions they've made and i'm sure people make mistakes in their calculations or in the assumptions they make as well and this is proving how tricky it is to calculate these things so even if you streamed for the whole year constantly on your mobile phone you got 52 kilograms that's nothing he's streaming any car but that's six grams was that just for your
energy use or does that include the materials to make your smartphone and how do we get rid of the smartphone afterwards i hadn't thought of that actually i'm not sure if it includes uh yeah the construction of the the technology and disposal that's the problem with uh with all these calm footprints as to what scope do they fit in are they just looking at the use stage so they consider the manufacturing stage the raw material gathering what assumptions go into it
and then i think that's what makes the comparisons difficult so like i mentioned before how many emails 65 emails was equivalent to one kilometer 65 emails was equivalent to driving one kilometer in the car but then coming back to antonia's point does that include the manufacturer of the car maintenance of the car disposal likewise for the email does it include whatever device you type that email and we have to think a lot deeper about things like that i wonder in some instances if the
article that earlier read was sort of deliberately picking a comparison that made us stop and think that hang on a second maybe i should pay more attention to my digital carbon footprint maybe that was the intent in portraying it that way and it seemed to have the desired effect yeah exactly because i think it's stated for example sending one email is equivalent to four grams of co2 emissions and just just in in the electricity responsible for that and for me at the time i was like
cool but that you're right in that the comparison made me stop and think like how am i how is my email how my emails being compared to driving a car wow like i didn't think they were even comparable we need those things to put things in context because like now we said oh what does six grams of co2 what does that mean we don't know but then comparisons like that do help people put things into context so maybe in those ways they are useful even if they're not really accurate
say if we were going backwards to like before we had emails what was the alternative just sending a letter when i thought about the car situation i was thinking okay if i wrote letters well if i know for a fact i would write incredibly less letters so i wouldn't be communicating that much so i'd send what a letter a day but how can that be compared to like the tens of emails i'd send in one day so i think that like although it's it's easy to compare like okay one
one letter the carbon emissions if you like one letter compared to one email i think that's an interesting comparison but i think most of us write way more emails than we do with like sending out letters they will have to travel more than one kilometer assuming the person you're writing the letter to is more than one kilometer away they might travel thousands and thousands of kilometers maybe by boat maybe by plane depending on on where they're going so in that way
then maybe email is better because it's avoiding us having to ship these letters all over the world i bet no one's done that life cycle analysis though of an email versus a carry a pigeon carry a pigeon sending in a bottle across the ocean but you know you know the calm footprint of like raising animals is quite high so we have to feed them actually carry pigeon might might not be not a car but it's not uh not free that's very true i guess even before letters they used to physically
walk to places right i love how like the world is going like more globalized and everything we're like going back to basics like can we run to the person to send the message speaking of travel we're all traveling a lot less at the minute um i used to travel a lot to conferences previously obviously can't do that so now all online um and i think that makes a difference to the quality what i get out of the conference it's really difficult to like strike up a conversation with someone in
passing over coffee because i'm starting my kitchen on my own and everyone else is doing the same thing yeah very awkward because then it it does feel like you're very purposefully contacting someone you're going hi specific person where is a conference you kind of mill around you kind of see oh what you know you you might overhear what what they're talking about first before deciding oh actually i'm going to join this circle of conversation instead now you have to
have a purpose and it's really it's really extroverted i've not made a single contact from an online conference that i've been to this whole time i've made loads of connections through like one-to-one emails or one-to-one sessions and discussions and i think they're really useful i just don't think anyone's figured out how to recreate that thing that antonio's talking about that kind of serendipity just meeting someone next to the plate of brownies and like starting up a conversation that
leads to collaboration or something like that i don't think anyone can recreate that online very easily which i guess may say something about maybe research outputs in science and engineering in what sort of five or six years time is the because i think the younger researchers in particular benefit a lot from those networking opportunities and what effect will it have on their career will it hinder it or not i guess only time will tell so this pandemic has kind of forced
us to rethink how we do site visits and you know we can only have a certain amount of people in the building so we what we've done like at work we've like strapped a gopro in someone's head and then we can just watch them as they go around a site and it sounds good because obviously it's more accessible lots of people can see and they can like live stream it and we can kind of work out the car like the carbon footprint of that compared to people going to site but i
do feel like having watched someone through their like gopro and actually being out on site it doesn't make any it does make a difference you don't kind of appreciate the kind of like access routes or access problems with the scale of some of the the issues when you're not physically there out on site so do you think that like it's quite good that we're able to be kind of that accessible making sure that we're continuing our work but at the same time are we losing out on something a bit
like you're networking just because we're kind of online it reminds me of okay this is not an advert for microsoft but in all these videos i'm streaming i keep getting a microsoft teams advert about this like coffee company and how they've shifted everything online and they do like their coffee tasting online now and so microsoft teams has like this virtual background feature and you just see all these people who are like placed on this virtual background which is like a coffee long
take like a bar table like on bar stools so it puts all their faces and then when they're drinking their coffee it looks like they're all sat together drinking coffee which they've done a really good job because it's affected me their advert i'm like wow this looks amazing i want to do a virtual coffee tasting with these guys it doesn't look awkward or weird like any other of these like virtual coffee mornings that people have but like i think they're just done a
good like job in their like marketing department but they're saying they yeah they reach more people that it's more accessible but it it's not the same as it like you can't just smell the coffee like that other people have made for you what if um what if we started making it actually into vr though can you imagine how that would work was telling me about a really awkward work social where instead of being physically together during covent they uh they had avatars that
physically moved around the room or or they drove cars the the little activity and they had their little like corporate headshot driving the car you know if we started getting down that that virtual reality room would it be a little bit more like but then i guess the question is that what is the the common footprint of that how much more is it than just the gopro on someone's head it's not quite vr but i did find that in video calling or video conferencing if you take
turn off your your video again who knows if the what the assumptions were going behind this but it could reduce it by 90 of the carbon emissions that was oh wow so forget putting on proper clothes and like tidying up your background just just turn off the video for carbon carbon emissions sake because i can imagine vr being very intensive i i did a vr game like years ago i'm sure it's that progressed since then but it's like it's like you're holding on to things you've got like the goggles on
it but it feels so real and that was like a few years ago but it does feel like i was screaming it's like one of those vr gaming places and like the people working there must just like laugh constantly all these idiots like playing these games and thinking they're being attacked by monsters like i know what you're saying antonio in that like you set your cameras up and stuff but at the same time you'll be kind of someone that human interaction so like you know i want to
imagine me never switching my camera and my manager would never see me because i've never met him and i think it's kind of balancing that like are we trying to go for a a zero carbon footprint process in which case that's like quite difficult we're not and we're really not there yet um or what's kind of the okay compromise i've not read anything that this is kind of where we should be heading in terms of our carbon presence online like what's kind of like okay and acceptable because i don't
think we're gonna be in a position at least not presently in a situation where we're just gonna have no carbon footprint from our online presence and it's just trying to work out actually kind of what is acceptable and what isn't and i think the first thing is actually understanding what is our carbon footprint online and how easy is it to kind of work it out and i think that's what's quite hard at the moment i wonder what's the carbon footprint of of this podcast episode we're recording now
yeah i attempted to work out based on people downloading this episode based on some numbers that they didn't really explain their assumptions behind them um so given that our episodes are typically about 25 minutes long um and they're only about 15 meg works out is like a really tiny number of kilowatts per episode converting that by an average co2 emission which again is probably not all accurate if it's an average based on different energy sources um it works out with something like 4
grams of co2 per downloaded episode so that's pretty small but again you quite right factoring in that we're all sitting here with our videos on cameras on zoom and then i have to spend time editing the episode afterwards on my computer and then uploading it the the upfront carbon cost of the episode could be quite quite a bit bigger i guess so um laura you said it was four grams of carbon emissions four grams of co2 per episode downloaded yeah so that's equivalent to according to this one
website that i was on that's equivalent to one email being sent the electricity needed to send one email so you downloading this is equivalent to sending an email that seems wrong because it's just just from this pure like data size email's mostly text whereas we've you know we've got audio which if it's like 15 megabytes so what i saw was one research pointed out that energy use in in it isn't that efficient because it's like a train it doesn't matter how full the train is
it just goes so even if we're sending like a small small amount or a big amount it's just always on so actually maybe it doesn't matter if we have our video on or not because it's still going to do the same thing yeah i want to know like so say you have something running in the back because we can't see it it's like schrodinger's video is the video actually moving when you're not looking at it or do you have to look at it for it to be moving i don't know i assume it is moving
do you know what i mean no not quite i feel like you've gone into like inception and i'm not i'm not quite honest say i've got a video because i always have videos playing in the background but i can't watch them when like i have another window open in front of them i see what you mean i told you but if you're not looking at screen yeah i thought you might if you it's like that classic if a tree falls in the forest did it really fall if there's no one seeing it whatever i was just like
this is too too much philosophy for me right now yeah like so if i had it side by side the video is playing and it's all the pictures are moving and it's downloading it but if i have it on in the background with another window in front is that the same i assume it's the same i don't know why it would be any different it's just me i can't see it right i would think so i would assume that process is still running on your on your machine right yeah yeah okay but
imagine if we could code in a way that it wouldn't isn't that wouldn't that be great so like say it could like your computer can detect that you're only listening to this in the background so turn off the the video and then when you go back onto it the video comes back on just to reduce the amount of data you're using i think that would be such a great way of coding maybe we need green coding does that exist yeah i i think that's a really good point and i think that like kind of links on to
the fact that i'm i'm very much guilty of this i usually have like a billion tabs open i have so many different things going on and i know things are running in the background that's all it's completely unnecessary which might that's just a bad habit that i have so if you're able to like code something to make everything else just like stop the only thing that i'm looking at is the only thing that's needed i think that would really help oh i can just change my habit i mean
there is also that that other other option i think i think mobiles kind of have that built in just because of their how much processing power that they have that you know it just doesn't play in the background you're like oh okay this app is just closed because i i stopped using it for a bit and the battery saver came on so maybe if we had that but more widely you know on on computers we're only we only have two eyeballs but the computer is playing 20 videos at the same time the worst actually
adverts that play in the background right i hate them and 40d they only play when you have the tab open so so there is this stuff because i realized um because i've been watching a lot of the oc i found out it was on 40d and the adverts only play when the windows open if you minimize it so that it can just run in the background the adverts stop playing until you open the window again so this technology exists channel 4 share your technology yeah i used to be able to get an ad
blocker for um four on demand years and years ago and they kind of found a way around it just made me stop using it i didn't regularly use it until i found out the oc was on there which shows you my taste in television it's absolutely trash but it was nice nostalgia yeah i think which i think we should get into guilty pleasures of um streaming media that's going to take a terribly wrong turn one of the thing about adverts in video is on all my social media feeds i turn off auto play videos
mostly because if i really want to watch it i'll click on it but also because i feel like it's just unnecessarily consuming bandwidth and therefore increasing my carbon footprint i feel like these have come about because we wanted to save energy so it's actually quite handy having having one one use of it actually having a further use on our calm footprint we were talking about putting things in context as well we've talked a lot about the carbon footprint of our digital presence
but i suppose it's worth putting that into the bigger picture so i had a quick peruse on several different websites my understanding is that every little helps but it's not that big of a deal compared to a lot of the other industries i think um i saw something about if all of the um the internet was a country it was quite a significant country i've forgotten what country comparable to but global emissions wise it's about it's four percent you know i saw one website that said 3.8 and
another place said 3.7 surprisingly close actually considering all the other conversations we had about calm footprints and how how close they are this one was closer i do think i think what is interesting in our case is that um we don't have to wait until for example the infrastructure world we're at a place where we've built a lot of infrastructure now we're thinking about respectively about carbon and like the carbon embodied carbon i guess and a lot of infrastructure
and it's a case now okay we're already thinking about this as an issue so um we're only going to be online more and more and the pandemics probably has like rushed it a little bit than what we kind of initially anticipated so i guess it's us it's like kind of like on us now to look okay we're only going to be online more and more what can we do both in terms of our own habits in terms of like kind of the whole life thing that we were talking about before like in terms of the
the infrastructure which we built around it um and i think it's kind of just like taking a bit of responsibility for our actions at the moment and like kind of seeing where it was going where it's going in the future i think that's kind of where the way i see it because the smaller things we're doing might not be big but um in the grand scheme of things but i think if we're all kind of the whole world's kind of getting more online then it's something that we should probably be thinking
about and i think what antonio said as well before about not just the data transfer but the whole life cycle of yeah the manufacturing transport disposal of all the devices we're using as well i'm sure if we incorporate all that into the life cycle that significantly increases the carbon footprint and okay you might say oh just the data transfer doesn't you know it's a couple of grams but we wouldn't be transferring data if we didn't have all of these devices
right so it's really important to think of the whole whole big picture it sounds like we're all sort of agreed that our digital footprints actually don't contribute a massive amount to our entire carbon footprint but it's still something that's worth thinking about and if there are ways that you can reduce your carbon footprint from your online presence then maybe you should at the very least it might make you feel a little bit better about what you're doing or you just look into it and see
what your carbon footprint actually is i also think that's kind of how we got where we are now it was all these little actions from all these people around the globe that kind of led to the climate emergency that we're now facing and it'll be all these little actions and this collective efforts combined from these little actions that'll get us out of it and i think that's probably a good place to end this episode the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said
them they did not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate us leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to continue to have frank discussions about science and engineering please get in touch [Music]