German government decisions concerning the digital transformation of administrative processes often surprise me. And the way my friends manage their bank accounts, communication with doctors or, quite generally, sensitive private information online just leaves me flabbergasted. Presumably, I am not the only scientist who considers the current state of information technology precarious.
My background is in theoretical and computational physics. I have been programming since the 1990s and I am a staunch linux user.
Opinions expressed on this web domain are my thoughts as a private person, not statements that I make as a civil servant.
In many restaurants you need to scan a QR code to read the menu. My employer does not send salary statements by post anymore. And my baker's till displays a QR code instead of printing a receipt. The argument is always the same: replacing analogue by digital technology is considered environmentally friendly because it saves paper.
But, what is so bad about paper?
Paper is produced from organic, renewable raw materials. It can be recycled easily. For paper used in Europe, we can cover the complete supply chain in Europe (or in other countries which have similar standards concerning labour law and environment protection). You can store information on paper without using technology produced by American companies that do not bother about European data protection laws. You can retrieve the information easily even after hundreds of years.
It is not at all obvious that printing information on paper is always inferior to storing it digitally. As often, it depends.
Tanja, 21.9.26Recently, my employer stopped sending salary statements by mail. Instead, the employees are expected to download their salary statements as pdf-files from a server. One argument brought forward in favour of this procedure was that it was environmentally friendly. This suprised me.
Sending a letter produces 20-30 gramm CO2 (this estimate includes the production of the envelope and the transport in a lorry).
To estimate the carbon footprint of downloading a pdf from a server is harder, because it depends on answers to questions such as: How often do the users replace their hardware? How is the hardware recycled? How is the electricity produced that runs the server? If the user is prudent, one obtains an estimate of 1 gramm of CO2. However, if once per month the user asks an AI assistant to find the website from which the salary statement can be downloaded, the comparison is much less convincing.
In any case, we are looking at very small contributions to the total CO2 production. In Germany, one person produces on average 10 tons of CO2 per year. I.e. a letter contributes 1/400000 to this. This implies, if one would completely stop sending letters and replace the entire mail service (for letters) by a CO2-neutral technique, one would save only about 0.1 percent of the total CO2 production.
If each person reduced their coffee intake by one cup per month, the effect would be at least ten times as large as the effect made by abolishing salary statement letters.
Tanja, 28.9.26