The thought of wanting to be eco-friendly is definitely a noble one to have. Out of the top of my head, here is a list of little somethings you can do, as a programmer and otherwise, to contribute your part:

• Write your code efficiently. As a programmer, there’s a high chance that you are bound to end at a place where your code will reach millions of users. Writing efficient code, say for instance, optimising the number of API calls that it takes to get to a view, will have a significant impact. Keep yourself educated, on what you can do to improve yourself in writing performant, efficient code.

Articles like these — Optimise ES6 Output Size & Performance by @grgur — are awesome. Being sensitive to your users’ bandwidth is not only a + to them, but also to the environment.

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• Be biased towards hosting providers who have their servers hosted in green data centers. Do read this — How a green datacenter affects your website

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• Ride a bicycle to work. 🚴 Or use public transport. Kudos to @alkshendra @fazlerocks, @somu, and @sandeep; all of them ride a bike to work.

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• Base your decisions on data. This! Take for instance the argument — “everyone should go paperless for the betterment of the environment”. How true is the argument though! Always argue with facts. Have you counted in the the energy expenditure factor of the digital devices?

Take the study done at the KTH Center for Sustainable Communications, for instance.

It looked specifically at reading the daily news in print, on a computer, and on an e-reader. It factored in different mixes of energy used to produce and consume the news as well as the differences in materials needed for printed versus digital versions. It also examined how much time was spent reading them. All of these factors can significantly change the environmental impact of news reading.

The study found that if you live someplace that produces its electricity similarly to the European average (that is, slightly greener overall than the U.S. average), and you spend just 10 minutes a day reading the news, then reading online or with an e-reader produces less of an environmental impact, measured in terms of carbon emissions.

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• And finally, stay informed. It is great to do your part, but what is greater, IMO, is to support the people who’re already at it. One way you could do this is to stay informed on everything they do, and spread the word about all the awesome stuff they’re doing. I love Tesla. Tesla is going to change the world!

Tech uses power and produces heat, so anything helps if it reduces the amount of tech being run and kept 24/7 in climate-controlled spaces. That goes for severs, but also for big hot monitors in your office (hold your hands over an apple cinema display some time - you'll realise why your office heats up). Measuring that is harder, particularly when "dust cost" comes in (total environmental cost of something including manufacture, shipping, maintenance, power, decommission and disposal). It's probably only going to make a major dint if your product is consumed at scale.

Partly I think we can help by being a little frugal in our tech purchases and what we push on our customers. Buy new workstations every three years, rather than two; buy laptops and set frugal power settings (why shouldn't it go to sleep after 5 inactive minutes?). Don't upgrade your phone every year.

But more than that - don't build products that only work on this year's gadgets. I have an original Nexus 7 that I still use daily, but it's struggling eg. I use Facebook via https://mbasic.facebook.com (which is awesome and I applaud Facebook for providing it) since the app and main website crash. Kindle app is slow and often needs a restart. Google's own apps are slow and there are too many pushed to the device that I don't need.

The point to consider is I don't do anything now that needs more power than it did four years ago. In fact I use the device for precisely the same things that worked beautifully on its release. It's in great condition and should still work, it's only the software that has changed - and people feel that's fine since this device is "so old".

Four years should not be an extraordinary lifespan for a small consumer device. The OS and apps should not have become so hungry so fast. Before anyone tries to say Apple devices are different, I also have a gen1 iPad which went the same way in less time and although I was lucky enough to win it; had I paid it would have cost around 4x as much as the Nexus 7.

We should build things that work on old, slower devices; because that leads to less nasty e-waste which is expensive to recycle - if it gets recycled at all and not dumped in landfill.

Turning off the systems before leaving the workdesk

This alone will save a lot of electricity.

Can try out the following things :-

• Hand dryers and kerchiefs are better than paper towels.
• Don't burn waste papers. Recycle.
• Try public transport or cycle once a week.
• Use white boards instead of notepads.