Many Australians worry about datacentres swallowing up local land and energy but we rarely look closely at our own digital trails.
Our endless photo and video streams, bursting inboxes and unread subscriptions all feed the appetite for ever growing digital infrastructure. The average person spends 40% of their waking hours online – browsing the web or social media, streaming music or videos, or communicating – producing the equivalent of 229kg of carbon emissions, a study in Nature Communications found. And using AI tools and chatbots to generate text, images or video consumes “orders of magnitude” more energy than traditional computing methods.
