Should you adopt an e-reader to reduce your carbon footprint or be satisfied with traditional paper books? Prefer CDs and DVDs to streaming? These are the questions that the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe) tries to answer in its latest report. Because in one generation, the digitization of practices has profoundly changed our relationship to culture and transformed our habits in terms of music, film and video consumption.
A matter of intensity
First observation: the environmental impact of a cultural service, whether digital or physical, depends largely on the intensity of use made of it. For example, listening to music with a CD has a greater environmental impact compared to digital formats, when taking into account the entire life cycle of said CD (from manufacturing to disposal of object, through its use). However, this impact diminishes over time, since it is a medium with a long lifespan – you can listen to it again for decades, and lend it, give it away or sell it if you get tired of it.
Moreover, reading a 300-page novel in paper format has, at first glance, the lowest environmental impact on all the indicators taken into account (resources, CO2 emissions, etc.). However, for use of more than 10 readings per year – and on the assumption that the paper books are new and never reused – a digital reader will have less impact on climate change than a new book in paper format. And if we start from the assumption that a new book is read at least twice, then the reader only becomes more ecologically reasonable beyond 20 readings per year.
Finally, contrary to many preconceived ideas, the carbon footprint of an email is negligible: for example, sending 200 emails a week for a year is like traveling 5 km by car.
Energy-intensive equipment
In addition, Ademe highlights the fact that the digitization of cultural services complicates and multiplies the equipment needed for these new services. Equipment which involves a wide variety of raw materials and metals and which, for all streaming music listening scenarios, contributes the majority of environmental impacts (the rest being related to transmission, processing and data storage). In addition, the use of streaming is often accompanied by an upgrade of equipment (larger screen and high resolution). However, the larger the screen size of these devices, the greater their environmental impact. Finally, to reduce the latter, it is advisable to make your equipment last as long as possible.
Ademe recommends downloading content upstream during off-peak hours, cutting the video when listening to music online, adapting the resolution of the video to the equipment on which it is viewed, or even favor the use of wi-fi over mobile networks whose infrastructures consume more electricity. Small gestures that could make the difference, when we know that, if we watch an average of ten hours of streaming per week, on a laptop, in high definition and in 4G, this is equivalent to making a trip of 181 km in car per year, compared to only 17 km for the same consumption but with a smartphone connected to wi-fi and in low definition. Calculations that can be made thanks to the tool made available by Ademe which makes it possible to assess the ecological footprint of our cultural practices – even if they often look like hobbies in the face of the three posts of major emissions, namely transport, heating and meat consumption.