Digital
Cleanup
Day

16 March 2024

What is

Digital Cleanup Day?

It is a day dedicated to cleaning up our digital lives, just like we clean up our physical environment on World Cleanup Day

Digital Cleanup Day, organized by Let's Do It World, is a global initiative aimed at raising awareness about digital pollution, encouraging individuals and companies to declutter and organize their online presence.

Digital Cleanup Day 2024 will take place on 16 March.

Why get rid of digital declutter?

Helps to reduce
CO2 emission

Prolongs your
devices’ lifespan

Speeds up and
simplifies information
sharing and finding

Reduces data storage
security risks

Increases disk & server
capacity, helping
reduce costs

Be cool – don’t feed global warming with digital waste! 

Cut down your CO2 output by joining Digital Cleanup Day!

Did you know..?

Digital waste facts

  • It takes more energy to mine for BitCoin than the whole of New Zealand consumes in a year! (a), (b)

  • In just one year (2007), one zettabyte of data was created worldwide. By 2010, this had doubled. In 2035, we will create more than 2,000 zettabytes. To print out one zettabyte of data you would need the paper from 20 trillion trees. There are only about 3.5 trillion trees left on the planet, so that is not possible. (a), (b)

  • In 2022, about 70 million servers were used to store data. Each one caused the production of 1–2 tons of CO2. In that year, about 20 million of them became e-waste. (a)

  • 99% of data was created within last 10 years. (a)

  • Limitless consumption of data today needs 3 times more energy than all the solar panels the world can produce! (a)

  • The Internet produces more than 900 million tons of CO2 each year! (a), (b), (c), (d)

  • 90% of all data is never accessed 3 months after it is stored. (a)

  • 91% of web pages get no traffic from Google. (a)

  • 320 billion emails are sent every day and 62 trillion spam emails every year = 20 million tons of CO2! (a), (b)

  • One email emits, on average, 4g of CO2 = the carbon footprint of a light bulb turned on for 6 minutes! (a), (b), (c)

How to participate

Digital Cleanup Day in numbers

870,000

participants

12.7 M GB

of data deleted

3,169 tons

of CO2 production prevented annually*

Since 2020, 170 different countries and territories have taken part in Digital Cleanup Day.
Almost 870,000 people have deleted close to 12.7 million GB of data, preventing the yearly production of around 3,169 tons of CO2*.

* For the calculations of digital waste, we use the world average CO2 emission figures of the International Energy Agency, according to which 4 GB of data stored on servers and other data storages for one year consumes 2 kWh of energy and produces 1 kg of CO2.