What is the environmental cost of your content strategy?
Every day, more and more information is put into the world wide web, where it exists in potential perpetuity in rapidly proliferating data centres.
Data centres consume vast amounts of electricity, much of it generated by fossil fuels, and extraordinarily high levels of water for cooling. The cloud is now responsible for more CO2 emissions than flying and it is only going one way – up.
Sitting behind a laptop in a largely virtual entrepreneurial world, is this reality shaping your content?
The major social media platforms are all now prioritising one-minute-long videos. Video is seriously data-hungry and CO2 intensive. Just 1GB of downloaded data can generate 3kg of CO2. All the casual scrolling and consuming of TikTok trends have a huge environmental impact.
As an entrepreneur, you are undoubtedly being pushed to contribute to this environmental impact by keeping up with the latest, most effective trends. You are told, over and over, that your business needs the lifeline of views.
A single reel produces 25MB + of CO2. A mind-blowing number of reels are uploaded each day and billions are streamed.
Scrolling is one of the most carbon-intensive activities. With more than 500 million users on Instagram, the typical usage is equivalent to every single person driving 166m in a car.
Cloud storage is a massive CO2 producer. Every GB of data downloaded produces 3kg of CO2.
The more content we put on social media, the more CO2 is produced.
Over time the carbon footprint of your content is compounded.
Without a doubt, as entrepreneurs, we have a responsibility to ensure that the content we put out matters and creates positive change. Simply adding to the noise is contributing to the rapid deterioration of our collective environment.
It isn't just social media of course. The paperless office may not be contributing to the loss of tree cover directly, but every email produces 4g of CO2 at a minimum. How many emails fly around the world every day?
Cloud storage and transfer of important documents are also big CO2 producers. And just running your devices to keep your business going is responsible for around 400 kg of CO2 a year.
The virtual business is far from environmentally friendly.
You can make choices about how you power your office, the resources you use and the way you work but you have no control over how the cloud is resourced. But you can change your content strategy to reduce your environmental impact while upping the impact you make on people.
None of us needs to fall into the trap of following the trends. We can all create a different approach that treads as lightly as possible upon the earth.
You can choose to go for quality over quantity.
You can get conscious about what you are saying and how it is interwoven into your strategy.
You can stop doing what the platforms tell you is necessary to get eyeballs on your content and start following the energy to express what matters.
If everyone took at least one small measure, the impact would be significant.
For my business, I have already taken a number of measures over the last year that have a positive impact.
I have:
- Streamlined email sequences with few steps and minimal emails.
- No or very few reminders or last chance type emails.
- Reduced my posting from 5 days a week to 3 and reduced my social media platforms.
- Limited short-form content such as reels.
Some of these were not necessarily driven from a CO2 perspective but they certainly help.
From now on, a few other things I am putting into practice in my business are:
- Mapping my cloud presence and making sure I don’t have backups of backups – one copy in one place only.
- Paring back email sequences to remove non-engagers at the earliest possible point and unsubscribing them from my lists.
- Deleting old videos and posts from social media and YouTube.
- Reducing my posting once again, 2 posts a week except for time-sensitive invitations.
I will keep this closely under review throughout the year and make sure I am focused on quality and impact at every step.
Every action we take in business must be conscious of the impact – both positive and negative. We can make a big difference both ways by being present in the cloud in deeply impactful ways. Conscious content is something each of us has complete control over and we can make a big difference through the smallest of actions.
