IEMA's Digital Cleanup Day: A Green Initiative from the Green Team

It’s easy to forget how much clutter we store in our digital world. The cloud provides an easy way of hoarding megabytes of documents, images, videos, and emails. Unlike real life this clutter doesn’t invade our spaces, it won’t overflow a closet space, and it won’t spill over our contour tops for everyone to see. It’s tucked neatly away and only accessible when we open our files, so is easy to forget that they do have an impact on our world. IEMA’s Green team spearheaded an initiative to reduce this impact by undergoing a digital clean-up day.

Identifying the Issue

IEMA is a professional membership organisation for everyone who works or is interested in sustainability and the environment. As such, we are keen to reflect our commitment to sustainability in the way we work. As many of our members know we are going through a Digital Transformation to help provide our members with better services, but this will require a heavy reliance on digital tools.

This reliance however comes with a downside as uploading, downloading, and storing of documents requires energy consumption from the devices we use to access those documents to the energy needed to power the internet and the energy use to power up data storage where all of these bytes of information are stored. Even though the carbon impact of a gigabytes is not massive it adds up quickly if left unchecked. This realisation promoted IEMA’s green team to take action.

Surveying Our Digital Usage: Understanding the Data Landscape

The first step was to understand the habits of the staff regarding how they used our email storage and our different cloud systems as well as the type of data stored and how frequently we access it. This valuable data provided insights into our digital usage patterns and areas for improvement that we use to develop our digital storage policy.

Developing a Data Storage Policy: Guidelines for Sustainable Practices

With these valuable insights, we developed our Digital Storage Policy to regulate the retention period of our data storage to mitigate CO2 emissions. We also develop clear guidelines for our different types of files and email storage and set out retention periods to help us reduce digital clutter, minimize unnecessary data storage, and contribute to lower energy consumption.

Measuring the Carbon Footprint of Digital Activities: Quantifying Our Impact

The next step was understanding how much data we had stored on our different cloud systems and understanding the environmental impact of the digital activities of the IEMA staff and members, so the green team researched the digital activities, including data storage, file transfers, and social media posting. Online meetings and video streaming as well as recommendations to reduce the impact. These insights provided a clearer picture of our environmental impact and the reduction potential.

Educating Our Workforce: Raising Awareness and Responsibility

To ensure the success of our digital cleanup initiative, the Green Team conducted a workshop on educating the team about the environmental impact of digital activities. These workshops highlighted the importance of data management practices, file retention strategies, and ways to recommendations to reduce the impact of each digital activity. The Green Team also explained how the digital clean-up day was going to run on the day.

Digital Cleanup Day: A Collective Effort for Sustainability

On a designated digital clean-up day, IEMA staff actively participated in reducing our data storage footprint. Employees engaged in a thorough review of their files, identifying, and deleting redundant or unnecessary data. This digital overhaul included incentives for both individual and team contributions. We compared the amount of gigabytes stored by each staff member before and after the cleanup to assess the impact. As different teams have varying storage requirements based on their work, rewards were determined by the percentage reduction in each individual and team's data storage compared to their previous levels. This collaborative effort resulted in a remarkable 26% reduction in our cloud storage capacity, a testament to our commitment to efficiency and sustainability.

The Magnitude of the Impact: A Contribution to a Sustainable Future

The reduction in data storage translates into a significant reduction in carbon emissions. Based on our calculations, the 26% reduction equates to approximately 1.96 tons of carbon dioxide emissions avoided. This achievement is a testament to the collective effort of our staff and the effectiveness of our digital cleanup initiative.

Conclusion: A Commitment to Sustainability

IEMA's digital clean-up day marks a significant milestone in our journey toward a more sustainable future. The initiative not only reduced our environmental impact but also fostered a culture of responsible digital practices within our organization. As we continue our digital transformation, we remain committed to minimising our carbon footprint and fostering a more environmentally conscious workplace.