Sustainability is a broad term. At home, you may be thinking about separating waste and whether or not to purchase green energy. Business-wise, we go paperless as much as possible and take a critical look at our vehicle fleets. But what we often forget is that digital files also leave a footprint on our planet. In this blog, we discuss three ways you can reduce your digital footprint.

1 Get smart about your digital files

That two Google searches are comparable in terms of CO2 emissions to boiling a kettle of water appears to be a tall tale, but there is no doubt that digital files consume energy. Therefore, if you create a lot of files as an organization, you consume a lot of energy in the process. Often this is unnecessary. In a previous blog, we compared your digital storage to a closet. If your closet becomes too full, you can of course buy a larger one. It is smarter to clean up seriously and ask yourself - à la Marie Kondo - for each item of clothing: 'Does it spark joy'? That way you'll be left with exactly the stuff - clothes or digital files - that makes you happy and you can rearrange everything from scratch. This requires a new way of thinking but gives you enormous rewards.

2 Take a critical look at your storage devices

When you create a lot of files, you also need a lot of storage. An extra - portable - hard disk or USB stick is bought in no time, and when they stop working, thrown away in no time. Not only do you have to dismantle such a device very carefully, because - especially since the dreaded AVG - you can't just put a computer by the side of the street or leave a USB stick lying around. These devices also contain heavy metals and other things that are not easily degradable, not to mention the production of new devices.

3 Provide good parent files

Sustainability is about making the world a better and greener place, and thinking about the lifecycle of your digital content is part of that. But how? Recycling seems like a tricky concept when it comes to digital files; it's not like you cut a digital photo into a thousand pieces and then turn that into another photo. But if you make sure you have good master files, you can easily use such an image multiple times through a variety of channels and expressions. Use the high resolution for print and convert to a lower quality for your social media outlets. Create a crop from the photo for a brochure and use the entire photo for a banner on your website. This way you can reuse an image many times and provide content to a larger audience within your organization. Not only does this save energy and disk space, but you don't have to send a photographer out again for every variation in image.

Chicken or egg?

Of course, this is a chicken-or-egg issue. Where does it start: with the hardware or with the digital files? Actually, it doesn't really matter where it starts. The point is to start thinking about our digital energy consumption. Working with a Digital Asset Management system is the first step toward that single source of truth; it helps you deal with your files better and more efficiently, increase the lifecycle of your files and make quicker choices about keeping or discarding them. And unlike in the analog world, you don't burden the digital world by throwing things away. If you dispose of your files properly, they are gone permanently, creating "closet space" again.

Talented marketers needed for transition to circular economy

Australian Andy Ridley, inventor of WWF's Earth Hour and until 2017 CEO of Circle Economy in Amsterdam, once said in The Guardian that the world needs talented, creative people like marketers to accelerate the transition to a circular economy. In doing so, he may not have had digital sustainability directly in mind, but digital sustainability also has a positive effect on our footprint and is therefore now high on the agenda of entrepreneurial Holland.

Curious?

Want to talk further about what a Digital Asset Management system can do for your organization and how to make its use a success? Feel free to contact us, we'd love to think with you.