Every June 5th, countries across the borders commemorate World Environment Day, a day to raise awareness of environmental protection. Introduced in 1972, led by the United Nations, the day has a special theme each year: “land restoration, desertification, and draught resilience”.” According to the UN, one football pitch of soil gets abraded every five seconds globally, and it takes far longer to restore the lost amount.

In addition to opening up discussions, participating countries are encouraging actions from various fields and industries to take action to observe it. 4i Magazine chose eco-friendly tech tips to help restore lands and protect the environment, which anyone can practice from home or office effortlessly.

Empty the trash bin of your email service

Many reports have noted that stockpiling emails in inboxes can lead to larger carbon emissions. This is because email services require electrical energy to store users’ text and image data. The bigger the organisation of an email service, the bigger its carbon footprint will be.

Try reducing the size of undeleted emails in your inbox and bin regularly. Deleting emails from unknown senders is also good, as it can help security companies scan unwanted content and improve their accuracy in filtering out spam or cyber threat messages.

Having fewer emails sent and received can also help save energy. When sending a big-size file to someone, sharing it through a cloud drive platform uses less energy from file transmission. If you have newsletters you don’t read, consider scrubbing your name off the subscriber’s lists of those services to save up your space and energy consumption.

Have video calls over in-person meetings

Hosting meetings online instead of offline can save you time and energy preparing and transporting them. If you are driving to attend such meetings, the journey may cost fuel and emit gas as you move around. In celebration of World Environment Day, try taking a walk, a bike, or public transport to your meeting venue, or simply replace an offline meeting with an online one.

Of course, working from home instead of going to an office daily is the most eco-friendly solution if that is an option for you.

Use smart devices to save energy

Some applications connected to household devices can be good for saving energy. Tracking their real-time energy usage and making users more aware of their consumption behaviour can immediately reduce costs or make energy use more efficient. Using devices with features that save battery, schedule running hours, or set energy usage caps can also be easy-to-follow solutions to keep your electricity bill low while being eco-friendly.

Since these connected devices need a seamless internet connection, it’s important to keep a WiFi router at an optimal location that can cover most of your home or office. Choose recent models rather than old ones, ideally with energy-saving features or dimmable LED light switches.

Set your devices to dark mode

It may be a tiny step, but turning your devices’ dark mode on can save their battery, translating into lower energy consumption. This usually is the case for OLED or AMOLED displays, not LCD-LED ones. LCD-LED displays need a constant backlight and trigger electric current to change into dark mode, which costs electricity. In contrast, OLED screens light only necessary pixels and simply turn off specific OLEDs when you tick the dark mode switch on.

Use green technology

Considering products whose developers are based on eco-conscious values or technologies is an inroads to protecting our environment, too. This can range from buying items from suppliers that state sustainability goals to visiting shops that offer plant-based, recyclable packaging.

There also are tech companies that come up with more eco-friendly inventions that can replace people’s everyday devices, having users leave a less significant impact on the environment without them noticing. For example, phone manufacturers like Fairphone and Teracube aim to make smartphones not made of harmful materials like lead and mercury, or use biodegradable ingredients.