Digital posters carry a significant carbon footprint

Replacing a printed flyer with a digital version can seem like a straightforward environmental victory and an obvious greener option. It uses no paper or ink, and leaves no surplus piles to send to the recycling bin.

However, design researchers in China examined that assumption and found that digital materials carry a substantial footprint of their own.

Measuring invisible costs

Yilin Liu, from the College of Art and Design at Shaanxi University of Science and Technology (SUST) in Xi’an, China, led the research.

The researchers traced a single digital poster across its full lifecycle, from its creation through to deletion. Their aim was to quantify the carbon footprint of a format widely regarded as clean.

For their example, they used a typical advertising poster: a standard high-definition image displayed for 1,000 viewing hours on phones, monitors and public screens.

They included every phase of the poster’s life and found that it produced 7.3 kg of carbon dioxide.

That figure is not disastrous in isolation. What is striking is that a file without a physical presence, paper or delivery still has a measurable environmental burden.

Where carbon resides

Very little of the total footprint was created by the design process itself. Time spent at a keyboard producing and revising the work accounted for only a minor share.

Almost 90% resulted from transferring the file and powering the displays on which it appeared. Whenever the poster loaded on a device, it passed through electricity-dependent networks and data centres.

It then remained illuminated on a screen, consuming power throughout its display time. Across more than 1,000 viewing hours, that continuous demand accumulated. The finding reflects a broader trend.

One assessment suggested that an average person’s annual web browsing, streaming and video calls consume part of the carbon budget available to the planet. Digital behaviour is not without weight.

Power and place

When the team investigated which individual factor had the greatest influence on the outcome, data-centre efficiency emerged as the answer.

This depended on the proportion of electricity used to run computers rather than lost through cooling. An efficient facility wastes only a small amount of energy.

By contrast, a badly managed centre may use almost as much power to cool its equipment as it does to perform its computing tasks.

Replacing the least efficient arrangements with the best ones shifted the poster’s overall footprint by around a fifth in either direction. The source of that electricity mattered equally.

Cleaner power and more efficient operations appeared to strengthen one another, delivering greater benefits on low-carbon grids than on carbon-intensive ones. Location also had an effect.

Although most views were recorded on European screens supplied by relatively clean electricity, a far smaller proportion of views in the Asia-Pacific region generated a disproportionately high share of emissions.

Cutting the footprint

The researchers also assessed ways to reduce emissions. Used together, the measures lowered the poster’s climate impact by nearly a third, while the largest improvements at the design stage came from using more efficient hardware.

It was also helpful to schedule demanding processing for periods when the local electricity grid relied more heavily on renewable power. Lowering screen brightness and managing display power made a difference too.

Shifting work to cloud-computing services operated by major providers was not as wholly beneficial as it may appear. It cut the energy consumption of office computers.

Yet the repeated transfer of data offset some of that advantage. Another study reaches a similar conclusion: certain online activities use considerably more energy per minute than others.

Digital versus print

Compared with conventional print, the digital poster generally still performs better.

A printed poster usually produces between 8.2 and 15 kg of carbon dioxide, with much of that impact embedded in paper production, printing and transport.

The key distinction is when those emissions occur. Print produces most of its carbon emissions at the outset, then remains passive on a wall. A digital poster distributes its impact across every hour spent loading and glowing on screens around the world.

For campaigns aimed at vast audiences across multiple locations, this arrangement can favour the digital file because one poster can reach thousands of viewers.

That advantage, however, depends strongly on efficient equipment and clean electricity operating behind the scenes.

Changes in media

Before this research, the environmental impact of digital design was largely based on estimation. Studies had used broad data-centre figures instead of measurements captured during the design process itself.

Liu’s team developed a method for monitoring the impact in real time, step by step, and supplied the industry with a firm figure. This alters what design studios can do.

Instead of assuming that a digital campaign is automatically green, agencies can pinpoint where emissions build up and pursue reductions with greater precision.

According to Liu, careful management can both achieve substantial impact reductions and maintain creative excellence.

Although the approach was developed for static posters, the same monitoring could extend to video advertising, animation and interactive material, all of which transfer considerably more data.

Choosing digital benefits the climate only if the networks and screens supporting it are clean and efficient, rather than simply because digital has been selected by default.