Leveraging circular economy in digital services

Remember when you were reading “save the planet do not print this e-mail” at the bottom of the e-mails you were receiving? We were all blissfully happy to think that the digitalisation of our world meant less carbon footprints and environmental impact. It was a beautiful picture that helped us feel good about ourselves and justify spending more and more time in front of our blue light screens.

What if I told you that this is false? That it has all been a lie? That our digital world, internet, e-mails, data storage and what’s not is quickly becoming one of the biggest polluters of our modern world. We need to take action. The need to control our volume of e-mails and to clean up the unnecessary data has become essential. And in an industry like ours, where creative files are often enormous, we need to find ways to recycle our creations. We need to find ways to create circular economy in digital services.

The scary realities of digital waste

If you watched the above video, you know by now that every time we press send on that e-mail, every time we save a file, every time we stream a movie online (oh this is not good news), we have an impact on our environment. It’s not because we don’t see it that it doesn’t exist. And how come? Well, because of data centers. Data centers that require energy and resources to build and to run everyday.

According to a report by the carbon emission think tank The Shift Project, the information and communications technologies (ICT) sector represents 4% of global greenhouse gases emissions which is just as much as Civil Aviation! (Mind blown).

At this point, you need to understand the values that have been at the core of Lime Agency since the very beginning. We are all about positively contributing to our society and environment and there we were, sweating up at the thought of our carbon footprint. When you realise that sending an e-mail with a medium size attachment to 1 person is the same as leaving a 60W light bulb on for 1 hour and that 10 billion e-mails are sent every hour(that the equivalent of 15 nuclear plant producing electricity for 1 hour)… your head starts to spin.

For us, it not only made us think about the tens of thousands of emails we had sent (many of those with attachments) but it also made us think of all the files, all the creative options that were sitting in our ever growing servers.

You see, in a material world, it is “easy” to improve on your environmental impact. Everybody knows about re-use, re-duce, re-cycle – and circular economy is on everybody’s lips. But how could we, as a digital service provider do something about our activity, our impact? Something that would be useful to the people we serve and that would positively transform our digital waste?

Supporting entrepreneurs through circular economy of creative services

Of course, we started cleaning up folders, implementing new e-mail processes and optimising our servers/ cloud options. We are still in the process of improving things but it worked as we have already achieved great results on our web sustainability.

However we wanted to do more. We looked into the sheer volume of projects and creative options we had been developing over the past 4 years. And all this digital waste got us thinking. If this is pure digital waste, then how do we transform it? How do we reduce our negative environmental impact and help our community at the same time?

And it clicked: Circular economy!

If we had already re-duced then we would re-use and re-cycle! All the unselected creative options that were sitting there, unused. We loved each and every one of them. They are all professional branding options which abided by all the requirements of the best brand logo designs. We believe that each single one of them could provide solid foundations for budding entrepreneurs and companies. That these branding options could support their growth and expansion. And they were there, just waiting to be used.

So we did what most would think impossible. We transformed unselected creative options that were adding to unused data into fantastic opportunities for start-ups and entrepreneurs. We created a real branding marketplace with off-the-shelf solutions that could set you up on the track to success in just one click and most importantly, for very affordable prices.