Eco-Friendly Alternatives To Your Most-Used Apps
Written by Alex Fisher
Thumbnail & Banner Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash.com
You probably use your phone or laptop to some extent every day. Between working on assignments, messaging friends, and relaxing, university students tend to spend upwards of 50% of their days on screens—but have you ever considered the environmental impact of these daily routines?
Every time you send an email or search the web, there’s an environmental cost to that action. It takes energy to power the screen you’re working on, receive your inputs, and transmit that data over the internet to wherever it’s going. In many cases that energy is generated in such a way that produces carbon emissions. Even if you live in the Loyola Residence on campus, which recently won a sustainability award, the servers you’re using when you browse the internet may not be powered using green technologies.
That isn’t to say that there’s nothing you can do, however. In this article, we’ve gathered a number of apps that you can use to help save the environment, all without changing any of your habits.
Ecosia: The Browser and Search Engine That Plant Trees
Whether you’re looking up movies or sources for assignments, about 93% of all web traffic comes from search engines like Google and Bing. These searches, along with the infrastructure to support them and the websites you’re trying to find, accounted for nearly 4% of global emissions as of 2021. While more recent data was unavailable, this number was projected to double by 2025—something that seems likely when considering the environmental impact of AI, as we’ve discussed in a previous SMU Journal article.
This is where Ecosia—and search engines like it—come in. These apps primarily work by using the algorithms created by larger companies and running them on their own servers. Ecosia in particular uses the algorithm Microsoft created for their search engine, Bing, with some additional refinements. By doing this, the not-for-profit company can run a search engine even with significantly fewer resources than the big names like Google or Microsoft have, allowing them to keep pace despite being far smaller.
You might be asking, why is Ecosia better for the environment than Google? There are two main answers to this question: how they spend their money and how they power their services.
Search engines make money through a variety of means, but primarily through the pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement model. Ecosia is no different in this regard, with the company’s search engine mainly making money through PPC advertising. Rather than spending billions on AI, however, Ecosia spends 100% of its profits (earnings above operating costs) on environmental initiatives. These initiatives mostly focus on planting trees in various countries around the world but the company also supports the development of solar farms and agricultural projects, among others. Ecosia even publishes its own financial reports with the tagline, “we’re all about transparency.”
In addition to these initiatives, Ecosia has followed through with its own eco-friendly practices. Rather than relying on fossil fuels to power its data centers, the company has been powered entirely by renewable energy for several years. Since mid-2020, Ecosia’s solar initiatives have generated twice the power necessary to support their needs, and the company’s practices cut more carbon emissions than they produce.
What Ecosia is doing is clearly working for the company, as in early 2024 they launched the Ecosia Web Browser. Packed with modern features like tracking protection, a sustainably-powered AI chat akin to Microsoft’s Copilot, a built-in battery saver, and more, the Ecosia Web Browser is not a compromise of morality versus usability. Using the browser lets you help the environment in even more ways than using the search engine, with sponsored links that allow you to support Ecosia while doing your usual shopping without spending a single cent more. Finally, the company has a highly user-friendly privacy policy to keep you and your data secure. The best part? All of it is completely free.
TooGoodToGo and Olio: Reduce Food Waste, Save Money
Every year, over a billion tons—between one-fifth and one-third of all the food produced in the world—is wasted. The cost of all this lost food is in the trillions of dollars, with an estimated 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions coming from food waste. This is in spite of the fact that hundreds of millions of people around the world go hungry every single day even though there is enough food produced for every person on the planet to be able to eat healthily.
While they may not provide solutions to ending world hunger, there are a few apps in the vein of food delivery apps—which are another topic we’ve written about in the SMU Journal—that are designed to help reduce food waste.
TooGoodToGo is centered entirely around this idea; the first thing you see on the app’s website is the slogan, “save good food from going to waste.” Essentially, the app works by allowing companies to sell perfectly good food that they have left over at the end of the day and would normally just toss in the garbage. The food is even sold at a discounted price, reduced to only half of the normal cost or even less. This means that you’re saving your money as well as the environment. There are two catches to this model, however: you have to go pick up your order, and you don’t actually know what you’re getting.
While TooGoodToGo might operate similarly to a food delivery app, it isn’t one. When you place an order, you’re essentially telling a restaurant, bakery, or cafe that you’ll come by and take some of the product they didn’t sell. This allows them to make a little extra money off of food that was perfectly fine and just didn’t sell, while you save yourself some money over ordering a typical meal and you get to enjoy some fresh food. This is also why you can’t order anything specific; because the companies that list themselves on TooGoodToGo never know what they’re going to have left at the end of the day: they can’t allow you to order specific items as they may not have any left. While some may consider this a deal breaker, at the end of the day you’re still getting fresh food at a discounted price and helping to reduce global food waste.
Olio is another app focused on reducing food waste and saving you money. Olio’s model is even simpler than TooGoodToGo’s, and functions more like a reselling app such as Kijiji: you simply find what looks good to you, message the person offering it, and arrange a way for you to get it. Instead of using money, however, listing something on Olio is an offer to either give something away or trade it for something else. While the app is not strictly limited to food and does have a section for non-food items, the primary goal of Olio is to keep your grocery costs down and food out of the garbage bin: why go to the grocery store for those last-minute salad ingredients when you could message a neighbor on Olio, helping them out and getting what you need for free?
It’s worth noting that both of these apps do have limitations in how much support they receive compared to conventional food delivery apps like SkipTheDishes. While TooGoodToGo does offer service all across Canada, the selections around Halifax can be limited depending on the day and how far you’re willing to travel. Olio doesn’t have the concern of whether or not companies are going to opt-in to the app’s services, but it does rely on its more community-based nature. At the end of the day, though, this is no reason not to use them at least some of the time: the more popular each of these apps becomes, the wider support for them will become and the more options will become available.
The realm of eco-friendly apps is hardly limited to the three we discussed in this article. For example, the Forest app is one we’ve talked about in a prior SMU Journal article that allows you to help plant trees just by keeping productive. There are also email services like Tuta, Posteo, or Mailbox.org that are centered on both privacy and sustainability. While there are countless apps that we could have discussed, Ecosia, TooGoodToGo, and Olio are all especially important because they allow you to make a difference by both preventing and reducing waste at the same time. As the Olio website states: “A billion tiny actions got us into this mess. A billion tiny actions can get us out.”
Have you tried using any eco-friendly app alternatives? Let us know your thoughts on our social media pages.