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Sustaining Earth

Here is a list of simple but effective ways of decreasing negative impact from your existence.

# Recycle bottles and cans

Most types of bottles and cans are fully recyclable. Recycling glass saves a lot of energy because melting glass is easier than raw materials.

# Reuse instead of recycling, if possible

To save energy when using glass bottles, reuse is the clear choice. Even taking into account the heavier weight of reusable bottles, the energy per use drops by more than 10x (source from 1994).

# Avoid usage of plastic

Unfortunately recycling plastic isn’t very effective, due to a number of reasons, mainly because it costs more than producing new (since fossil fuels are very cheap and a lot of plastic is dirty). Just burning plastic as a way to get rid of it is very harmful for the environment as well. It produces toxic gases and releasing heavy metals in the atmosphere.

The best solution so far is getting rid of single use plastic such as plastic bags and glasses.

Switch to these alternatives:

# Delete old emails and unsubscribe

Delete unimportant emails and unsubscribe from all unimportant sources. The energy cost of data transfer and storage is about 3.1 kWh/GB (source).

I’ve recently cleaned ~8.6K (which weigh around 630MB) of junk mail, saving ~2kWh of energy.

You can calculate energy savings from deleting your emails here (assuming average email size is 75KB):

Deleting e-mails saves0 kWh.

This is equal to 0 days of a burning light bulb.

# Keep your battery healthy

In order to avoid quick degradation of the battery on your devices, set a charging threshold to about 80-90%. It’s currently supported on Android and some laptops (usually in battery settings).

# Unplug devices and chargers if battery is full

A phone charger consumes 0.26W of energy even with no phone connected. When your fully charged phone is left connected, use jumps to 2.24W (source).