After a conversation with Tracey Madden in the dim and distant past, I’ve been more and more interested in the impact our services have on the environment. Our Web and Communications Section in LTW have had some very talented ‘green’ interns this summer and I’ve been lucky enough to get a bit of time to discuss and reflect on this with them (Osh Doherty, Chris O’Neill and Catalina Rincon) and in fact, we had a really invaluable conversation with Paul Moran and Scott McEachern from Amazon about what they are doing in this area – particularly of interest to me given how many of our services are hosted on Amazon Web Services.
I’ve been reflecting on some of our services here in DLAM. To be clear, I’ve had to estimate the carbon dioxide output at a very general level because I’ve not been able to get any more specific numbers (yet) but I’ve used numbers from:
- ‘Wholegrain Digital’ – which gives an estimated ballpark that 1TB of cloud storage emits approximately 2.7kg of CO2e per year
- OpenCO2.net – this allows you to compare the CO2 with normal everyday things
This is quite rough-and-ready but my goal is to get something a bit more specific to our services longer-term. These numbers also do not include the building of data centres or creation of actual hardware for data centres which is even more impactful on the environment. However, the more storage we save, the less data centres we need. We are a drop in the ocean when you look at this globally but every little bit helps, if everyone prioritises this, we could make a huge difference.
Our Learn VLE
We have 26TBs of courses on live Learn and a similar amount on our staging server for Learn (which is effectively a pre-production version of Learn to help us test).
These 26TBs of data on our Learn Service is generates around 70kg of CO2 per year. What does 70kg of CO2 a year look like? Well, that’s like 500 kilometres of driving.
Media Hopper Create
We currently have 131TBs of media on our Media Hopper Create service. That’s almost 354kg of CO2 per year. That is the same amount of carbon as for 2500 kilometres of driving.
This is justifiable if people are using that data for their studies or to inform them of something the university does but as off the end of May, we had 294.5K items of media on Media Hopper Create and just over 69K of these items of media have never been played!
So where do we go from here?
We’ve done a lot of work over the past few years to make our services more GDPR compliant but typically that ties in with people’s accounts aging out when they leave. The next thing we’ll be tackling is getting rid of content that isn’t used – accounts that have no contents and haven’t been logged into for years, content that’s not been viewed or played, course sites which no longer have owners. If you are one of the people this impacts, we’ll contact you to tell you what we are doing and what you need to do.
In the meantime, I need to deal with my own digital ‘hoarding’ problem. I’ve been at the university since 2007 and have lots of files I’ve not needed for years. The discussion with our lovely interns is just the push I’ve needed to inspire me to deal with it 🙂
