How to reduce physical and digital waste – a story of dumpster diving

By Allison Lazarz and Lisa Crispin – and our workshop participants at the Agilists4Planet 2.0 conference.

How can we reduce both digital and physical waste? While physical waste is more “in-your-face” because we see it each time we throw something in the trash, digital waste can be harder to keep top-of-mind.

When we ran our recent workshop “Let’s Go Dumpster Diving” at the virtual Agilists4planet 2.0 conference, we had teams work together to sort physical trash items that were inside of a dumpster on our digital tool – a Miro board.  We created a digital dumpster, and it was easy to think of items to add to that dumpster because they are items that we see in the physical trash on a daily basis – either in our own homes or our friend’s houses.

But when we think about what would be our dumpsters if we were considering digital – not physical – waste, it becomes harder to picture what we’d have in such a dumpster.  Yet digital waste is quite prevalent and will only continue to increase unless we make a conscious effort to keep it at bay.

We achieved our goal to get our workshop participants to brainstorm new ways to reduce physical and digital waste. Now, we want to share these ideas with the community. 

Diving for physical waste

We had prepared a Miro board for two groups to work through our exercises. We randomly assigned people to the two breakout rooms and they went right to work!

Sorting & categorizing

The first activity in our workshop was dumpster diving for physical waste. We asked participants to sort through a dumpster load of trash, dragging items to a Miro board frame to sort and categorize them. With an agile take on the process, we asked them to think of this as a sprint’s worth of work. The resulting categories included:

• recyclable
  • can have further sorting into paper, plastic, glass and so on
• reusable/repurpose-able
• compostable
• trash for the landfill

The teams quickly realized that rules for recycling, composting and reuse vary based on geographic location. They agreed that this complicates the process, and is yet another obstacle to responsible trash sorting. This led to good conversations, and some effective ways of categorizing the dumpster contents. Based on what was in the dumpster, one group went with these categories:

• Compost
• Reuse
• Recycle
• Refuse

The other group got more specific:

• Repurpose: Elastic, ziplock
• Paper
• Plastic bottles
• Metal
• Compostable
• Styrofoam

Reflecting to improve

Since we wanted to demonstrate an agile approach to dumpster diving, it was time for a retrospective. We asked the two groups to think about the themes that emerged as they dove into the dumpster together. What’s been thrown out in the trash previously, that now would have another destination or purpose? Are you generating categories of physical waste you could reduce? How could the team improve for the next “sprint’? Effective ways of sorting and categorizing are a big step towards reducing physical waste. Lots of interesting themes emerged.

Participants noted that there was lots of packaging. One of the teams considered the juice box. It didn’t seem recyclable due to being made of mixed materials. But by taking a few moments to separate the plastic from the paper, both pieces could be recycled, a big win for reducing physical waste!

One of the participants in “Team 2” added a graphic to the Miro board that gave guidelines for handling waste, pictured below. This provided inspiration as they sorted. They felt that they could have imagined reuse purposes for more of the items, if they’d had more time.

Ideas to reduce physical waste

Ideas for improvement if there were a “next time” included:

• Using a buddy system or even a family activity
• Monitoring and inspecting the sorting process to get more ideas for improvement 
• Reduce the packaging through steps such as making healthy snacks at home that don’t come in packaging, using reusable grocery and produce bags. 
• Keep produce fresher with a damp cloth inside the storage bag helps reduce waste. 

Overall, participants planned to get more clarity in what needs to go where. This was a perfect segue into Allison’s sharing her method for doing an at-home trash sort. 

A proven method of successful sorting

Here’s a quick overview of the steps Allison uses for her own home trash:

1. Choose a large trash bin and put all your trash in for one “sprint cycle”, say, two weeks.
2. Find a location out of the elements (no wind!) that is ok to get dirty, like your garage, deck or driveway (and grab some rubber gloves)
3. Log each item in your trash with pen and paper. Put tick marks for repeat items.
4. Sort the items into categories. There’s no right or wrong, just what seems useful. You can improve after each retro!
5. Have your own retrospective on how you can reduce what gets thrown away. Can you compost your food waste? Take advantage of bulk bins at the grocery store, where you BYO container?

After working through our physical waste, it was time to see if we could adapt any of these lessons to digital waste.

Types of digital waste

Are you having trouble thinking of sources of digital waste?  They could be from your personal life (photos and videos stored in a cloud-based platform) or from your place of employment (documents or data logs, probably also stored in a cloud-based platform).  Check out this great list of sources of digital waste in the “Clean Up” section of this AgileAliance.com blog post.

Types of digital waste that we might reduce

Our participants took time in their breakout rooms to think of different types of digital waste, and what data they would manage each “sprint cycle”. The results were mind-boggling! Data storage is a big one. And there are so many sources. Emails are an obvious source. Everyone admitted to being subscribed to newsletters they never read. Old folders copied from one computer to the next… Communication apps like Slack aren’t optimized to minimize storage, and often we use those apps when we could talk in person. Participants confessed to having files they will never use again on their cloud storage. Photos, screenshots and videos that nobody will ever look at again are out there consuming resources. And, we back all that up, but never get rid of any of the backup files.

Automated tests were an interesting topic of discussion. Sometimes tests could be run more efficiently locally, rather than in the cloud. Teams often keep running tests that they no longer need. Lack of knowledge about efficient coding techniques is also a problem. 

We’re so used to our normal behavior like having umpteen browser tabs open at all times, we don’t think about how those resources being used can add up. Several participants also mentioned AI/LLM tools like ChatGPT. They use up a lot of resources, yet we use them so casually. Applications also use up much data storage. Hardware also contributes to environmental woes when we discard it.

The size of the problem

Once we begin to keep digital waste top-of-mind it becomes easier to reduce.  If you’re wondering, “isn’t it better to store information digitally than physically?” The answer isn’t cut-and-dry.  While there are some scenarios where physical storing or printing of information is better for the environment than the digital equivalent, it doesn’t negate the fact that there is a lot of digital data being stored in servers and data warehouses around the world. Allison shared some statistics with the workshop participants, and we now share them with you.

Author Gerry McGovern, in his book World Wide Waste: How Digital Is Killing Our Planet And What We Can Do About It, estimates that by 2035 there will be 2,000 zettabytes of digital data – that’s 2,000,000,000,000,000 GB (2 quadrillion GB) of data.  If that number alone doesn’t make your head hurt, consider that, per McGovern, it takes about 0.015 kWh of electricity to transfer just 1 GB of data and causes 0.0042 kg of CO2 pollution.  Multiply 2,000 zettabytes of data times each of those numbers and you get a staggering 30 trillion (30,000,000,000,000) kwH and 8 trillion 4 hundred billion (8,400,000,000,000) kg of C02 pollution. 

For reference, in the U.S. a person uses an average of 29 kwH per day (see this HeraldNet.com article), and just 1 kg of C02 can fill a large (~1m in diameter) beach ball (see this cogo.zendesk.com article).  Those numbers are staggering!  What can we do to get ahead of this?

Sorting & categorizing our digital waste

Similar to the approach we can take with physical waste and a physical trash can, we can imagine we have a digital waste bin filled with all of our digital waste.  Write out a list of all the types of digital waste you can think of, then organize it based on category or theme.  The categories/themes can be whatever makes sense to you in terms of sorting and can change each time you take stock of your digital waste.  Examples could be:

Category: personal digital waste – Items: photos, videos, music

Category: business digital waste – Items: stored documents, log files

Or,

Category:  digital photos – Items: vacation photos, baby pictures, selfies

Category: digital videos –  Items: instructional videos, videos of my kids, vacation videos

Once you’ve categorized your digital waste, consider in which categories you could start reducing.  Easier said than done, of course!  It’s common to keep digital data around for years (even decades) because we don’t feel it will ever be safe to delete it – what if I need that file some day?!  So what can we do to lower the amount of digital data being stored in the cloud?  We need to start asking some questions!  Questions such as:

1. Do I really need file X?  (All of these blurry photos?  This video of my feet that I accidentally took?)
2. If I don’t keep file Y around, what will the consequences be?  Would the consequences be severe?
3. What email lists do I actually want to be subscribed to?
4. Does my company have a retention policy set on data that’s being stored?  If so, can it be shorter?
5. Do my company’s log files need to contain all of the data that’s currently being captured in them?

And the list goes on!

A real-life example

Allison had the opportunity to do some digital waste reduction at her company several months ago.  She was operating on a very small scale, just looking at data storage for the group of teams she works with.  She discovered that there were hundreds of logs with no retention policy set so data was being stored indefinitely.  By reducing retention policies on large log files, and adding retention policies to files that didn’t have one set, she was able to:

• Reduce overall data storage by 540.5 GB/month
  • This equates to saving just over 1 ton of CO2 emissions annually and a saving about 162 kWh/year!

It’s nothing substantial, but regardless, we are saving energy as a result of this project!  Not only that, but we are saving money because we have less data storage.  It’s a win-win!

Allison can’t help but think about the small dent that her project made, and how much more there is to do!  If other teams in her company took a similar approach.  If all the companies in her city/state/country took the same approach, etc…

She’s hopeful that her small-scale project can inspire others to do something similar.  Small, individual actions can add up to big, large-scale change!

Ideas for reducing digital waste

Our workshop  participants got back into their breakout rooms to brainstorm ways to reduce digital waste. They considered both their personal life and work.  A few suggestions were:

• Schedule time on a regular basis (weekly, monthly, etc…) to go through stored data and delete items that are no longer serving you
• Make it a point to unsubscribe from email lists that you’re not regularly reading
• “Live in the moment!” – the suggestion here is to consider taking less photos/videos and, instead, be present in your experiences
• Be conscious about your company’s data retention and if policies are unclear, ask questions (maybe policies could be put in place if there aren’t any)
• Configure servers to autoscale, and only use the number of servers and other devices needed at any given time
• Remove unused features from products
• Implement a cloud strategy to “follow the sun”, and use the optimum locations from your cloud service provider where energy use is lower
• Analyze your automated tests to see if any can be deleted, run less frequently, or run on a local server instead of a cloud where that is more efficient
• Discuss with teams how to be “in your face” by default with monitoring dashboards or other ways to keep digital waste top-of-mind
• Talk to other people about your new digital diet habits!

We also agreed to delete our Miro board after a few weeks to save a bit of digital waste!

For more ideas on sustainability and digital cleanup, see these guides:

• https://www.agilealliance.org/agile-sustainability-initiative-quick-start-guide/
• https://www.agilealliance.org/digital-clean-up-this-is-how/

The post How to reduce physical and digital waste – a story of dumpster diving appeared first on Agile Testing with Lisa Crispin.