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Sustainably Digital: Part One – Why is sustainable tech so important?

  • Blog
  • 08 April '24
  • 4 mins
  • Tabby Duff

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Why is Sustainable Tech so important?

‘Reduce, reuse, recycle.’ It’s a mantra that’s been drilled into us all for as long as we can remember.

It makes sense when it comes to things like avoiding buying plastic bottles, second-hand shopping, or recycling takeaway pizza boxes, but what about when it comes to the environmental impact of your website or digital services? 

The following series on Digital Sustainability will be a deep dive into exactly that – how to be more digitally eco-conscious and future-proof your business. By taking proactive measures today, we can all do our bit to help the environment, minimise our carbon footprint, and strive towards a better, healthier planet. 

In this article, we’ll be delving into exactly why being eco-conscious when it comes to your digital offering is so important.

Cold, hard, and quite frankly, frightening facts


  • The hidden power behind ‘The Cloud’: It turns out, the cloud isn’t cute and fluffy. The cloud relies on millions of hard-wired servers that require a ton of energy to run, most of which, unfortunately, comes from fossil fuels. At Cantarus, we're mindful of these concerns and are dedicated to exploring and implementing more sustainable solutions, ensuring that our services remain appealing and conscientious choices for our clients.
  • The email avalanche: Does your inbox often feel overwhelming? It’s no wonder when a whopping 361.6 billion emails are sent per day. Every single email uses electricity, and a typical office worker sends and receives roughly 140 emails a day, creating as much CO2 a year as flying from London to Bruges, or watching 955 movies. To put it into a bit more perspective, 32 billion trees would need to be planted per year to offset pollution produced by unopened attachments, unread emails, and spam. 
  • Bloated webpages: In 2005, the average webpage size was 400KB. Fast-forward to 2022, and it ballooned to 2.2MB. This exponential growth in data consumption has contributed significantly to environmental strain. 
  • Energy consumption levels: Digital technology’s energy consumption increased by almost 70% between 2013 and 2020. 
  • Unused digital data: Up to 90% of digital data goes unused. If data weren’t stored, energy costs could be massively saved.  

As Jack Amend, co-founder of the Web Neutral Project, says, the internet is “essentially the largest coal-fired machine on the entire planet”. Yikes. 

So as we continue through another year living on a planet that's desperate for help, acknowledging the environmental impact of our digital choices isn’t just the responsible thing to do; it’s imperative. 

Now that you’ve got more of an understanding of why being digitally conscious is so crucial, stay tuned for our next blog post, where we’ll be discussing what we can do to help reduce our digital impact.

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