What is your household’s carbon footprint?
The primary school assignment sounded simple enough: “what are key stuff and habits that contribute to your household’s carbon footprint?
A first brainstorm listed some of the obvious key items like the number in our household (4), the house we live in (townhouse, 3 floors), the cars we drive (1 petrol and 1 diesel car), the food we eat (2 dinners no meat), our plugged stuff (Windows, Mac, iPhones, Switch, headset, speakers) our Holidays, and so forth. The data we generate as individuals on a daily basis was not top-of-mind? While it has an impact as well. Data’s thirst for processing power, storage and networking equate to a consumption need for electricity. And you can calculate how much 1kWh contributes to Carbon emissions.
The question how much data we produce is difficult to find one singular answer. But different sources estimate that for a typical single connected user (with 3 devices on the internet) the production ranges between 150 MB and 750 MB a day. So multiply that with the members of your household, and you have your family’s output. You can already imagine that the amount of data produced daily by our household is significant and impactful. And it is still increasing. Think of a typical day, and all emails (@work and @home), Your Office360 documents, WhatsApp messages, Facebook posts, TikTok YouTube Videos, Instagram posts, and so on. According to Bernard Marr’s blogsite here, 90% of the data ever created worldwide, was generated in the last two years!
It is not just the people and our internet usage, that drives up our appetite for more data resources. A key driver of today’s data-boom are the smart devices that come in many forms, flavors, and complexity. They are often always-on and interact, track, monitor, protect and bring us convenience.
According to IDC, there are more than 40 billion smart devices today, and the number grows by up to 35% each year. At home these could be wearables, Your door-camera, alarm system, Philips Hue lightning, Samsung TV, and the new kitchen fridge. A rich network of Internet-of-things that is continuously expanding and pumping out more data. How much data? Gigabytes, Terabytes. And viewed from a city or country viewpoint, we are talking about Zettabyte (ZB) Era. One ZB equals one trillion Gigabytes, or one billion Terabytes. That’s 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes (1+ 21 digits). It is estimated that the 40 billion. IoT devices today generate up to 80 zettabytes (ZB) of data. And some projects say the number of devices will exceed 200 billion shortly!
After a quick count, we concluded we had over 20 smart devices in our home. And that excludes the connected car parked outside. A datacenter in motion. And with between 70 and 100 sensors a serious data generator processing up to 25 GBs of data every hour. We also concluded this simple school assignment turned out much harder than expected.
NB: If you want to assess your Carbon footprint, visit: https://www.footprintcalculator.org/home/en)
