Digital Cleanup at UM: Reducing our digital footprint
Did you know that the world’s current data consumption requires three times more energy than all the solar panels on the planet can produce? Or that the Internet produces more than 900 million tons of CO2e each year? According to the David Suzuki Foundation, each Google data centre uses 1,703,435 liters of water every day.
Help reduce digital pollution!
Digital Cleanup Day is March 15, 2025, and all faculty, staff and students are encouraged to clean up their digital items.
What does this mean? Just like we clean up our physical environment, we can declutter and restructure our digital files, emails, and online presence. This can be done in March, or throughout the year as part of regular business.
Participating in Digital Cleanup Day aligns with the UM’s strategic plan MomentUM: Leading Change Together, with its focus on sustainability initiatives across campuses. A digital declutter will reduce data storage and security risks, increase work efficiency, and help to reduce CO2 emissions from data centres by minimizing energy and water consumption needed for operations and cooling.
Things you can do to clean up your digital spaces!
- Clean-up your inbox: Delete non-essential emails, unsubscribe from newsletters you don’t read, empty your recycle bin, delete old drafts you never sent, report unwanted spam.
- Reduce email attachments: Instead, circulate your documents by sharing the file links with others. This allows you to manage one secure copy in OneDrive, Teams, or SharePoint where you can manage permissions effectively.
- Clean shared storage spaces as a team: Get together with your colleagues and go over your shared storage spaces to identify content that could be deleted, transferred for long-term preservation, or better organized. Start by looking for multiple versions of documents, outdated reference materials. Get further ideas, and ensure you are complying with the University’s retention requirements here.
- Review your Teams channels: Review files and information in Teams and see whether any channels you manage might no longer be actively used or required.
- Empty your recycle bin or clean-up your Downloads folder.
- Use SharePoint for centralized document management, which reduces the need for multiple copies of the same document. It also includes versioning functionality – you can still see the edited history without keeping all 23 copies!
Outside of work, cutting down on scrolling can have a real impact as well. Five minutes on TikTok a day for 365 days produces the equivalent of driving 20km! Check out the facts here at Plan Be Eco.
For additional tips on digital cleanup, visit UM’s Access and Privacy Intranet.
To learn how to use SharePoint for centralized document management, register for the workshop offered through Learning and Organizational Development. Applicable courses include: