Your video calls save the environment
When many now return to the office it is tempting to travel for more face-to-face meetings, but the digital meeting is still best for the environment. A face-to-face meeting that includes one participant driving 20 km has 16 times more impact on the environment than a three-hour conference call with active video cameras, according to a study by France-based consultancy Greenspector.
And there is quite a difference between call only and if you run cameras for video call and if you share screens. So of you want to limit the negative impact on the environment with you meetings, these are the advices:
- Favour audio only during your meetings: the video stream (camera) will tend to consume a lot more.
- A mobile session is on average 2.6 times more impactful for the environment in terms of carbon impact when the video is added to the audio.
- Adding screen sharing is not penalizing if it is useful.
- Optimize the settings (when possible): adopt the dark theme, activate the data or energy-saving settings (in the case of LED, AMOLED type screens), advices Kimberley Derudder at Greenspector
The tests included 19 mobile applications: Big Blue Button, BlueJeans, Circuit by Unify, Cisco Webex Meetings, ClickMeeting, Go To Meeting, Discord, Google Meet, Infomaniak kMeet, Jitsi, Pexip, Rainbow, Skype, StarLeaf, Microsoft Teams, Tixeo, WhereBy, Zoho Meeting and Zoom that were all used on an S7 smartphone (Android 8) and all tests lasted one minute.
- Audio conference only
- Audio + video conference (camera activated on each side)
- Audio and screen sharing conference
On average, one minute of audio-video conferencing impacts 61% less than with activated cameras and 5% less than when sharing a screen.
The Top 3 for one minute of videoconferencing on average: Google Meet, Tixeo, and Microsoft Teams.
The main part of the Carbon impacts is from the user device (72%), followed by the Network (16%) and the Server (12%).
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