As we mark International E-Waste Day on October 14, a troubling reality demands our attention: the artificial intelligence revolution is poised to exacerbate the growing eWaste problem.

Every email you send, every video you stream, every AI query you run, they all leave a mark on the planet. The digital world has long been treated as weightless, invisible, consequence-free. But the infrastructure powering our connected lives is anything but. The good news? Understanding your digital environmental footprint is the first step toward meaningfully reducing it, and the actions available to you are more accessible than you might think.

To achieve the potential benefits and preventing and mitigating the risks of emerging technologies for people and the planet, AI development, deployment and governance must be in the public interest.

Email feels weightless. You type a few lines, hit send, and the message vanishes into thin air. Nothing is printed, nothing is shipped, nothing is thrown away. It is easy to assume the whole thing costs the planet nothing at all.

It doesn't. Behind that weightless feeling sits a very physical machine: the device in your hand, the wireless and fibre networks that carry the message, and the data centres that route, process, and store it, often for years.