Digital Cleanup Day Date in the current year: March 15, 2025

World Cleanup Day is an annual campaign run by the global civic organization Let’s Do It! World to address the global problem of solid waste. It was officially launched in 2018. The following year, computer scientist Kévin Guerin was inspired by World Cleanup Day and came up with the idea for its digital version. He contacted World Cleanup Day France and proposed a partnership with the Institute of Sustainable IT (Institut du numérique responsable).

Digital Cleanup Day was launched in France in 2020, during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. As most members of the World Cleanup Day community were confined to their homes, they were very receptive to the idea of a digital cleanup. From France, the event spread to dozens other countries. Since 2020, 175 countries and territories have participated in Digital Cleanup Day.

The main goal of Digital Cleanup Day is to raise awareness about the environmental impact of information and communication technology (ICT). Initially, it was thought that digitization would benefit the environment by reducing paper consumption. However, the digital industry has a significant carbon footprint that has been growing exponentially in recent years.

Every user contributes to the growing carbon footprint of the digital industry through digital waste (unnecessary files, apps and emails). The unnecessary data we store on our devices continues to consume energy even after we’ve forgotten it’s there. Digital Cleanup Day is dedicated to cleaning up digital pollution, just as we clean up trash in the physical world on World Cleanup Day.

Digital cleanup not only helps reduce our personal carbon footprint and the global carbon footprint of the digital industry. It also extends the lifespan of our devices, makes it easier to find and share information, increases disk and cloud storage capacity so we don’t have to pay for more storage, and reduces security risks. And there’s no point in keeping all those files you’ve been storing for years: statistics show that 90% of all data is no longer accessed 3 months after it was saved.

There are several ways to participate in Digital Cleanup Day. Start by cleaning up your smartphone, since it is probably the device you use the most: uninstall any apps you never use, as well as unnecessary photos, videos, and other files. Then do the same with your computer’s hard drive and any external drives you own: get rid of useless files, duplicates and blurry photos, delete browser cache, etc. It will help free up gigabytes of storage space, speed up your devices, and reduce energy consumption.

According to the Digital Cleanup Day website, between its inception in 2020 and 2024, nearly 1.2 million people deleted 14.5 million GB of data, preventing the annual production of 3,625 tons of carbon dioxide. You can help by joining the campaign and spreading the word on social media using the hashtag #DigitalCleanupDay.