“The digital is physical,” says Gerry McGovern. “Every digital action in our daily lives costs energy.”
In his 2020 book World Wide Waste, McGovern documents the true cost of our online lives through a blend of statistics and insight drawn from this work. It is important to make visible the intricate hidden web of energy-hungry infrastructure that allows us to use the internet as we do, he says.
He didn’t always feel this way. The 63-year-old Irishman started out as a digital evangelist, helping companies optimise their websites in the 1990s. As an independent consultant, he now helps organisations assess and reduce the environmental impact of their digital operations.
“Years of marketing and branding have gone into our perception that the digital world is ‘light’, ‘clean’ and ‘floating in the cloud’. The reality is very different,” he says.
Excerpts from an interview.
What first led you to interrogate the environmental impact of our technology?
For decades, the focus of my work was improving efficiency and helping clients market themselves better online. Then, in 2018, something about the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg’s messaging made me start to re-evaluate my life, including my work.
I started digging deeper and started to acknowledge what really goes on behind the facade of what we consider “virtual”. Over 50 million tonnes of e-waste were being generated globally per year (as of 2019). About 80% of the data businesses accumulate is not used after the first two or three months. Hundreds of hyperscale data centres are drawing enormous amounts of resources to make all this waste possible, and that number is growing rapidly with the onset of AI.
Until that point, seven years ago, I don’t think I had truly stopped to consider the impact of data or electronic waste, of the mining and carbon emissions.
What’s the worst thing, to you, about the digital waste that most of us don’t even notice?
On the data side, we are generating staggering volumes of information that will never be used. We took over 1.9 trillion photos in 2024. Most of these images will never be accessed again. Yet they are stored, indefinitely, on servers that run on power and water. The same is true in business; unused data clogs up data centres.
On the physical front, every digital device involves the extraction of minerals and resources. We have produced billions of phones over the past two decades. With their tightly compacted plastics, alloys and chemicals, most of their components couldn’t be recycled if we tried. The devices are used for a year or five and end up in landfills, rivers or soil, where they will continue to pollute for centuries.
Now that generative AI is part of the equation, the impact on all fronts is compounded.
What strikes you as most wasteful about the way we use the internet?
The replication. When you send an email, for example, it doesn’t just exist in one place. It may be copied 10 or 15 times across servers, and then it sits in the recipient’s inbox indefinitely.
The type of content makes a big difference too. Text is relatively light and energy-efficient, while an image requires much more energy, and a video far more than that.
Even the infrastructure matters: sending data over wifi consumes more energy than sending it via wired networks. But who uses those anymore?
In terms of efficiency, the simplest communication, such as an SMS, is lightest.
What would an ideal way forward look like?
The unfortunate reality is that with the introduction of AI, digital waste has become a much bigger problem. When I published my book in 2020, I was still hopeful that individual and collective action could help tip the scales. I really wish I could say that now, but I don’t think I can.
Organisations, big and small, have bought into the cult of AI and are paying even less attention to the impact of their digital interactions on the environment than they did before. We don’t care how much waste we produce. We just want convenience, or even the illusion of it.
Individual consciousness does matter, but what we do need is communities organising and questioning, holding tech giants responsible for the way they produce and dispose of digital waste.
LIGHTEN THE LOAD
Low-impact digital use is possible, even when you like, share, subscribe. So what can one do, to reduce the impact of one’s internet use? Here are some everyday hacks.
Keep it local: Only save data in the “cloud” if it’s information you will need to access regularly. For everything else, use an external hard drive.
Use your words: Text is the least-resource-intensive way to communicate via the internet. Use images only when necessary. Use hyperlinks instead of attachments where possible. Keep gifs, videos and voice notes to a minimum.
Declutter often: Think of your digital world as a nightclub that is at capacity; to let something in, something else has to go. If you take 10 photos, try to delete as many (or move some to a hard drive). Make this a habit with videos, emails and all other data saved to the cloud.
In periods of introspection, whether these be spring-cleaning, Diwali or Lent, go to your server-linked folders and delete what you can.
Break the bad habits: Stop wasting resources on texts and emails that simply say “Noted” or “Thanks”. Opt for the slower e-commerce option. You don’t need Zepto or Amazon’s servers pinging each other every few minutes for an item you don’t even plan to use until December.
When it comes to AI, go small: Avoid the larger models where possible, in favour of smaller, task-specific ones. Since smaller models are trained on far fewer parameters, they can use up to 90% less energy per query. Advocate for this change where you can. Even marginally more sustainable AI use will depend on governments and corporations doing this too.
Finally, when using AI, prompt right: Simply shortening a model’s response can reduce energy use per query by more than 50%. Make each prompt clear, concise and purposeful. Ask focused questions, and specify the type and length of response preferred. End each prompt with instructions to ‘Be concise’, ‘Briefly explain’ or ‘List key points only’.”
(Sources: Gerry McGovern, digital-footprint consultant and author of World Wide Waste (2020); Leona Verdadero, programme specialist with Unesco and co-author of the 2025 Unesco report Smarter, Smaller, Stronger: Resource-Efficient Generative Al & the Future of Digital Transformation; Ivana Drobnjak, professor of computational healthcare at University College London and co-author of the Unesco report)
