colinthornton/blog

World Wide Waste

May 29, 2020

After listening to Gerry McGovern talk about World Wide Waste on the ShopTalk podcast, I decided to grab the book from his website.

I’m not going to write a full book review or anything, I’d just like to cover the key takeaways and how I plan to implement, or at least be aware of them in my own life.

Gerry’s main point is that we tend to see digital as entirely eco-friendly, especially when comparing to a physical counterpart (email to snail mail, ebooks to paperbacks). But the fact is that all those digital methods have a non-zero impact on the Earth. Sending an email consumes energy to send the electrical signals through the net, and to store the data on Gmail’s servers. Energy consumption means using up natural resources, and the creation of pollution.

My biggest gripe with the book is that while Gerry tells us that “1.6 billion trees would have to be planted to offset the pollution caused by email spam”, he doesn’t have a calculation for the amount of trees that physical mail spam counts for, and this is true for generally all of the digital polluters that he covers. But to be fair, the point of his book was not to make that comparison, but to make us aware that digital is not free.

Towards the end of the book he writes up a summary of all his suggestions, so I’ll add the bullet points here.

Worth
-----
- Pay for value
- Buy quality
- Create quality
- Value yourself more
- Keep it local
- Avoid big brands
- Keep an eye on AI

Waste
-----
- Delete
- Don't feed the ads
- Avoid packaging
- Reuse
- Share
- Turn off

Weight
------
- Lighter is better
- Make digital weight visible
- Minimum data
- Minimum power
- Burn your own energy

Wait
----
- Learn to Wait
- Slow down
- Think

Every bit counts

I only finished reading the book this morning, so I haven’t been able to make any major changes to my routine, but every little change we can make for the better adds up. Here are some of things I’ve started paying more attention to:

  • Turning devices off when I’m not using them. We have a Chromecast at my apartment, and often we’ll finish watching something on Netflix and then walk away from the TV, leaving the slideshow running. This is just sucking up energy for absolutely no benefit. For computers, shutting them down instead of putting them in sleep mode is a big win.
  • Using dark mode. This may sound silly, but apparently there’s some evidence that dark mode (white text on a black background) uses less energy than your standard black-on-white color scheme. That’s why the blog you’re reading now has a dark theme (I also removed custom fonts to reduce the amount of data being transferred on page load). Several applications have theme settings, my two most-used applications (Firefox and VS Code), as well my OS have the option.
  • Reducing Reddit time. This is the hard one. Being on Reddit requires tons of data to be sent over the wire, and it’s addictive so it keeps you there browsing for hours if you’re not careful. This is all around not great for the Earth, or for my productivity. I’ve installed an extension to track my time spent on the site, so that I’ll notice when it’s getting a little too long. And I’ve tried to take notice when I get the urge to browse, and try to open a book, or go for a walk, or anything else that’s less energy intensive and/or healthy instead.

There are some things I’d like to do in the future as well. Gerry talks about the dangers of fast fashion, so I’d like to try to do my part and wear clothes for longer, repair them rather than toss them, and not buy them in the first place unless necessary (pretty good at that already). I use some cloud storage services like Google Photos, so I should go through my archive and delete photos I don’t need, and store the ones I want to keep locally.

Mostly I just want to be more aware of the impact that all my decisions have on the Earth. There’s almost always multiple options to any decision we make throughout the day, and I want to be more able to choose the least energy-intensive one. We only have the one planet, so we should try to make it last.

If you’d like to buy World Wide Waste, it’s available at Gerry McGovern’s website at https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/, but if you know me personally then I’ll be happy to lend you my copy.