Every time you send an email, a message, a photo or post something on the Internet, you save paper. However, you leave behind your digital carbon (碳) footprint.

You may think that the Internet has no effect on the physical world, but we store all the information on different websites, apps and social media on computer servers (服务器). They use lots of electricity. At the same time, they need to be cool, so we use more electricity to keep the temperature low. However, the production of electricity increases our carbon footprint and heats up our earth.

All information, pictures and music on the Internet travel in small packets called data (数据). So when we do an online search, the question we have put into the computer becomes data. The computer sends this data to the servers. They then process (处理) the question and send it back to our computers as data. The faster the search engine (引擎) works, the bigger the use of electricity. We use the most electricity when we watch a video online. This is because a lot of data travels to and from the server.

Different kinds of technology need different amounts (量) of electricity to work. For example, mobile phones use electromagnetic waves. These waves need more energy to move through buildings, bad weather and even plants. So again, the use of electricity is bigger. Cloud computing also uses a lot of energy because instead of saving your material on your computer, you store it on the server. So again, more data travels between the servers and the computers, using large amounts of energy.

One way to stop this waste is to always update your apps or software. For example, an old word processing tool needs four times more energy to work than a new one. Another way is to think before we see a film online: do you really need to see it for the tenth time?