April 22 is the International Mother Earth Day.

In this article, we want to share with you four easy ways to save resources of our Mother Earth.. 

One of the widely used metrics of the human's impact on ecology is Carbon Footprint. And Earth Day is probably the best day to think about your personal Carbon Footprint and how you can contribute to saving our Mother Earth.

Carbon footprint is the amount of CO2 that we cause and produce, either by directly burning consumables such as oil, gas, propane or coal, or by, indirectly getting involved in the overall emission when we are not using transportation and not burning anything, but when we consume products that require a lot of carbon emissions during their production cycle. 

So, for example, if a person doesn't drive a car and doesn't fly too often or use any transportation overall, and rides the bike instead, this person is still contributing to carbon emissions. 

Each person does that and it's totally normal, because we need to consume in order to survive and live happy lives, like in the example of the person above - they need a bike that causes some carbon emission during manufacturing stage and transportation to the store where it was sold. Not to mention tires and other parts that need to be renewed from time to time.

But it is normal to consume and cause some emission on our planet Earth, animals and plants also produce some kind of pollution. The key is to keep below a certain level which our Mother Earth can handle and keep sustainable ecology for everyone to live in, and below are a few lifehacks that anyone can afford and add to their daily habits.

Consuming less

Almost anything that we consume, from clothes to food, requires some energy to produce or transport. One can safely assume that in the modern economy of Planet Earth, almost any product is a derivative from oil. So, in order to keep emissions lower, we need to think in a lean way, avoiding overconsumption where possible.

So the question is not about getting rid of all consumption, which is technically impossible and wouldn't make any sense. The goal and the meaning of Mother Earth Day is to get back in balance with nature and get rid of all the redundant consumption. 

One way of achieving this is asking yourself before making any purchase these questions:

- do I really need, for example, a new pair of shoes if I already have old shoes which still look good or are good for hiking / sports / whatever the occasion you need it for?

- was this item produced locally, causing less emissions for transportation?

- is there a substitution for this product from the second-hand market?

- is this device / car / whatever energy efficient?

These questions would help you save not only the energy and resources of our Earth, but also save money in your pocket! Buying less stuff or consuming it less often will help you decrease your spending, your carbon footprint, and save space for storage.

Being smart with electricity usage

During our day activities we need a lot of electricity consumption. But you probably didn't know if you're using an electric dryer to dry your clothes that you could save 20% of electricity if you used this lifehack. The trick is to put one or two dry towels in the dryer each time you use it. That helps you reduce the time that is needed to dry things and decreases your energy consumption significantly to up to like 20 or 30% economy on electricity bills. 

Another small and easy life hack is to unplug all your devices that you're not using during your nighttime, which basically helps you save money while you sleep. TV, kitchen appliances like microwaves that you don't really need to be plugged in while you sleep still consume energy even in idle mode. It might not seem like a big number for one day or one night of use, but it can lead to significant energy consumption annually and year over year. So, if you don't need it, why waste energy, resources of our Planet Earth and your money?

Developing awareness and right habits

One of the most important things about these habits, such as unplugging devices each night, is that when you do these every day and think about ecological problems of our only home - Planet Earth - you actually develop your habits and remind yourself to keep a high level of awareness. Small rituals like this help you remember about these important issues and implement it to the way you live.

This becomes a philosophy and way of living. It shouldn't cause any damage to your lifestyle.

It is essential for people to feel happy while implementing these new habits, otherwise they wouldn't last and it won't be a sustainable solution. So, make changes slowly if you need time, but always remember that decreasing our pollution even by 10% makes it easier for our planet Earth to restore itself, providing a healthier environment for all of us who are blessed to call Earth home. 

Using less memory storage and the internet traffic

Freeing up life from redundant things gives us more space to live and enjoy lives. Like having more space in your house gives you a mental advantage, having more space on your devices gives you more room for creativity!

Keep in mind that almost 80% of email-traffic is spam emails or subscriptions that people don't read, according to the research by McAfee published in 2009. Around 62 trillion spam emails were sent annually according to the research, and it requires 33 billion kilowatt hours (KWh) of energy each year, causing about 20 million tonnes of C02 emissions.

So, spending a few evenings to unsubscribe from all email lists / spams that you don't read could lead to huge energy savings and help our Earth to restore.

Another big issue is memory allocation. Storage of any information requires production of physical storage, even if you are using cloud services - your information is stored physically somewhere! According to Moore's law, around every 18 months humanity doubles the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (or microchip). This leads to an increase of our computing and storage resources, but this law has one harmful side effect. When people have more memory and computing power, they pollute it with information garbage. And everyone can confirm that regardless of how much memory you have on your device, at a certain point you'll need more. 

So, being aware of this law and about the fact that cloud storage and internet traffic usage lead to an increase in Carbon footprint is essential to start saving energy on our IT front. Unsubscribe from spam emails, try to save your device's and cloud storage's memory by using modern tools and apps that help get rid of screenshots, duplicate files. Also, just use your camera to capture only the important moments, and when possible - switch to lower quality resolution or audio format.

If you are an audio / video content creator, pay attention to new technologies that use more efficient algorithms in working with audio and video files, which leads to faster processing, rendering, and in the end you get files that weigh significantly less than older version counterparts. Here at Castofly we are working on developing algorithms that are contributing to making video and audio content production more sustainable, leading to saving memory and processing power usage.

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