Kate Hall: Sustainable digital habits

Although it’s convenient, cloud storage and email inboxes have a bigger carbon footprint than one might think. 

To combat this, Kate Hall has been unsubscribing, deleting, and cleaning up her digital clutter. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack team podcast
from News Talks.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
That be.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
Sustainability on Saturday mornings. Kate Hall aka Ethically Kate, that's
a social media name, is with us this morning, Gilda.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Good morning.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
You're focusing on a bit of sustainability this morning that
I think most of us often overlook, and that's being
digitally sustainable. So like whether it's you know, you're kind
of online life, using emails, all that kind of thing,
using AI, how to be more sustainable when doing it.
So why does this matter? Why why should we be
looking at our digital behavior through a sustainability lens.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
Well, I think because we all engage in technology, right,
you know, we're all in our phones, our lapt ups,
our computers. We're storing photos, we're storing documents, restoring voicemais,
like we have all of this stuff that we because
it's not physically there, Like we're not putting our waste
into a physical rubbish bin. We're just driving it to

(01:05):
a little rubbish on our computers, and we're not actually
seeing we're not seeing the stuff visiblief, So we kind
of just don't think about it's impact a lot. But
you know, our cloud storage or our emails. AI in
particular has a carbon footprint, and I mean AI is
really new, and there's all sorts of stats around what

(01:28):
that carbon footprint is that that we've kind of properly
settled exactly on what that looks like. So I won't
quote any stats. But it's big and it's only going
to get bigger. Do you know.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
I remember seeing sorry to interrupt you, I saw something
from Sam Altman, you know, who's the CEO of open Ai,
which makes chet GPT. It was last month or the
month before, and he said they're spending millions and millions
of dollars on energy, but just just in the way
that people are saying please and thank you to chet GPT.
So the processing that is involved, if you say to

(01:59):
chet GPT, can you please give me an idea for dinner?
By saying please, the digital processing that is required requires
so much energy that when you imagine all of the
people around the world saying please and thank you to
check gpt, it's costing millions of dollars.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
It's full on it. And that's just one great example
of you think of all those little tiny emails in
your inbox, or all those duplicate photos that are sitting
in your cloud storage that are all adding up. You know,
we say, oh, I'm just one person, but we're just
one person out of billions of people. So there are
some really simple things I think that people can, like,

(02:39):
we can get into the habit of I really wish
they taught this at schools around, just like digital kind
of hygiene, because it's not only obviously from an environmental
point of view. Absolutely we want to reduce a carbon
footprint the amount of energy we're needing to store all
this stuff globally, but it's also about it being better

(02:59):
for your mental health too in a way. It's sure,
yeah if you're I mean, people say, you know, a clean,
cluttered space helps your mind as well, and I'd say
that with especially with your computer, if you're someone who
has all the tabs open, all the stuff all of
your desktop, or you're following people on social media that
you don't actually feed into your lives. So simple things

(03:22):
that I do. And I try to do this kind
of on a regular basis and just have that kind
of digital hygiene as a value of mine. But I'll
do this kind of every few months, maybe twice a
year of just going through and I'm subscribing from different
email databases, things that don't serve me anymore, deleting bunches

(03:43):
of emails that I don't need, and following accounts on
social media, looking and assessing my screen time and actually thinking,
you know, am I proud of this? It's less of
an environmental but more I am I am? Yeah, am

(04:04):
I proud of this? Like if I to be on
my gravestone right now? You know hat Hale spent four
hours and twenty minutes down his phone because is that Yeah?
Is this actually helping and benefiting my life? Our technology
should be supporting us rather than draining us.

Speaker 3 (04:21):
Yeah, than dictating everything in our lives exactly.

Speaker 2 (04:25):
And also the less time you spend online, Yeah, the
more data you're going to, more downloads you're going to download,
all those types of things. And speaking of downloading something,
it's it's about you know, when you're interacting with your computer,
when you're checking emails instead of downloading something, just clicking
through to the link on the internet. Yeah, differ different

(04:47):
stuff like that. I recently, kind of in the last
few years, made a task every single day, I have
a task that I make sure my downloads and desktop
is clear.

Speaker 3 (04:58):
Oh yeah, that's a good idea.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah, you don't get to the end of the year
and you've got this like huge, big full download folder
when you're going is this important? I actually don't know,
so I'm just going to save it all. Yeah, So
doing things like that. I also, especially as a online
content creator, I have a lot of photos and videos.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
Yeah, a lot.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
I'd say my digital footprint is yeah, quite big compared
to the average person. So I try. So there's different
apps you can use that actually help you go through
and cull a whole lot of that storage space, and
then you can delete the app when you don't need it.
So just actually, rather than just doing that whole spring

(05:43):
clean going around through your home, maybe awesome clean before winter.
Winter's a great time to do that, to actually focus on,
you know, what is my digital footprint? How can I
make this a happier space for me and actually reduce
my carb and footprint.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
Yeah. I think it's such good advice. You know, I
can't even wait as long as you do. I just
do it all the time. It's like a tidy house,
tidy mind thing for me. At the moment I gets
into the marketing emails. I personally malajories. I just immediately unsubscribe.
I just it just drives me nuts otherwise. But you know,
I don't often look at it through the leans of

(06:18):
you know, processing power and the energy required and all
that kind of thing. Most of us just look at
it as a kind of inconvenience, right, But it's such
good advice. Yeah, okay, hey, thank you for that. Kate.
Really appreciate your time as per And this is the
ironic bit of our conversation where we go from talking
about getting off digital devices quite you know as much

(06:38):
as we are, through reminding everyone that if they want
to find you and follow you online, they can do
so by searching ethically. Kate on the social media platforms seasone.

Speaker 1 (06:49):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
to News Talks B from nine am Saturday, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio