• 3 days ago
Internet is a big polluter. However, there are alternatives and simple tricks we can put in place to be more eco-friendly when we use it.

Here is episode 3 of our series of stories on eco-citizen initiatives with author Julien Vidal.
Transcript
00:00Behind us, we could think that we have a building, everything that is more classic and yet inside this building, there is a data center
00:06The 8th in terms of connection in the world and inevitably the first in France
00:10All these data centers, they pollute, they pollute a lot
00:13Today, the internet, you have to know that if it was a country, it would be the 6th consumer of electricity in the world
00:31This is a sound that we are all used to because every day we receive dozens of emails
00:37In the world, there are 12 billion emails that are sent every hour
00:41And that has a colossal environmental impact
00:44To lighten the servers, we can sort in his mailbox
00:48We can then necessarily empty his corbeille
00:52I see you coming
00:53The real problem is to definitely unsubscribe from spams
00:57It's a hassle to unlock individually each of the newsletters and unsubscribe
01:03It takes a long time, it doesn't work all the time, it's not very clear
01:06Fortunately, there is a 100% French solution
01:08It's CleanFox that allows us in a few clicks to definitely unsubscribe from all these recalcitrant newsletters
01:14It's very simple, we decide the emails we want to delete and the newsletters we want to unsubscribe
01:20There you go, 124 newsletters detected that we just unsubscribed
01:27It's 90 kilos of CO2 per year, which represents a total journey of nearly 600 kilometers by car
01:34And if we want to reduce the maximum energy impact of these emails
01:38We can change suppliers by going to the email side, which is also a 100% French solution
01:50Ecosia
01:56Hi Ferdinand
01:57Hi Julien
01:58Nice to see you
02:00So Ferdinand, we saw that we had a lot of ways to reduce its ecological footprint on the internet
02:06But we can also have a positive impact with a search engine like Ecosia
02:10Exactly, so we can have a positive impact in the sense that we use money to reforest the planet, to restore ecosystems
02:18So Ecosia works like a classic search engine, I just have to type the keyword
02:24Exactly, you can search whatever you want, it doesn't look at us
02:28And then from time to time, without even realizing it, you will click on ads
02:32These ads will generate a few cents, but since there are a lot of people who use it, in the end it makes a lot of money
02:39One tree every ...
02:40Every 45 searches on average one tree
02:42There are biodiversity hotspots in the world where there is really an urgency to act because local populations, climate change has a strong impact
02:52We really have to do something
02:54And so it's the African continent, South America, Indonesia
02:57And so you, to fight deforestation, you set up nursery
03:01Exactly, look, I'll show you one, it's one of the biggest, so there are about 5 million trees that are growing there
03:07It creates a lot of jobs, so in the whole area we are at about 1,200 jobs
03:11And these little trees will then be planted on the ridges of the mountains, in particular, to prevent erosion and to avoid floods that have already caused a lot of deaths in this region
03:20In Tanzania
03:21In Tanzania
03:22Ecosia for me is raging with simplicity, I say to myself, why didn't we think about it earlier?
03:27We are aware of the pollution generated by the Internet and immediately we imagined the mechanisms to participate, to build, to accelerate the transition with a part of the income that goes towards deforestation
03:41Today we earn about 1 million euros per month and 500,000 euros on average go into trees
03:47We had fun calculating that if one person out of five used Ecosia and not Google, we could plant enough trees to sequester all the carbon emissions in the world in a year
03:59Well thank you Ferdinand
04:00Thank you Julien
04:01See you next time, bye
04:10We gave you clues to reduce or have a positive impact thanks to the Internet
04:14Now you have to know that streaming video represents 60% of the world's Internet traffic
04:21What do we do? We do less but better
04:23Less by avoiding binge-watching on Netflix and better by using other video platforms
04:28In particular Imago TV, which has documentary and podcast available to me to understand everything about the issues of the transition
04:34The Internet is an extraordinary tool and I'm not telling you at all that you should stop using it, but on the contrary, use it more intelligently thanks to all the tips that I was able to share with you in this video
04:45Because finally changing your world is changing the world and participating in the construction of a better world, it starts with me