Digital Cleanup Day: March 16, 2024

Every year, on the third Saturday in March, it is Digital Cleanup Day. What is that, you ask? It is a day dedicated to cleaning up our digital lives, just as we clean up our physical environment. Lib4RI is again participating this year - join us and take a look at your digital waste with us!

Since we do not physically see the digital waste we produce, it is easy to forget about it. However, it is incredible how much data we accumulate. Did you know, for example, that:

90% of all data is never accessed 3 months after it is stored?
91% of web pages get no traffic from Google?
99% of data was created within the last 10 years?

All of this data has a direct influence on the environment: the internet produces more than 900 million tons of CO2 each year! However, there are more benefits to participating in the Digital Cleanup Day than “just” reducing CO2 emission:

it prolongs your devices lifespan,
it speeds up and simplifies information sharing and finding,
it reduces data storage security risks, and
it increases disk & server capacity, helping reduce costs.

So join us in participating in Digital Cleanup Day 2024! If you share your results, you will not only receive an award, you will also learn how much CO2 you were able to save. Every contribution counts towards a more sustainable future!

Since it might seem overwhelming where to start, we want to share some tips with you and tell you what we look at this year: our different storage devices.

Clean up your smartphone by:

removing all those forgotten old apps and games that you have downloaded, but have not used in a while if at all;
deleting any user accounts (including emails) and all their data that you have not accessed for what seems like a decade;
reviewing your photos and videos and delete unnecessary ones and duplicates; and
checking the guidelines from Digital Cleanup Day to help understand the impact of data on your smartphone.