Digital Cleanup Day 2025: Less Clutter, More Impact

Declutter, Delete and Make a Difference

Every year, on the third Saturday in March, is Digital Cleanup Day—a day to raise awareness about digital pollution and dedicated to cleaning up our digital lives. This week, try to tackle some of your digital waste, improve accessibility compliance, and make a positive impact on both the environment and our digital workspaces.

Why Digital Cleanup Matters

It’s easy to forget that our online activities have a real-world impact. Every document we create, photo we take and email we send is all digital waste when it is no longer used. Because we don’t physically see the digital waste we accumulate, it’s easy to overlook. All this data has a direct environmental impact. Did you know, for example, that:

• 90% of all data is never accessed three months after it is stored.
• 91% of web pages receive no traffic from Google.
• One email emits, on average, 4g of CO2 = the carbon footprint of a light bulb turned on for 6 minutes. 

Digital Cleanup and Accessibility Compliance

The University's Office of Digital Accessibility has introduced the 3Rs framework to help you break up and prioritize upcoming accessibility work and guide your next steps toward meeting the digital accessibility deadline. The 3Rs are Remove, Revise, and Right First. 

As we work toward a more accessible digital environment, it’s important to focus our efforts where they truly matter. Making every outdated or unused document accessible is not a good use of time or resources. Before investing in accessibility updates, we encourage you to Remove unnecessary content first.

Recommendations

The recommendations on the Remove Content webpage of the 3Rs framework is a great place to focus this week for the Digital Cleanup Day effort. 

Every obsolete file, inactive webpage, and outdated document that stays in our systems demands storage, security, and accessibility updates—all of which consume time and money. If it’s not needed, it shouldn’t be taking up space.


Article by Karen Matthes, Extension Learning Technologies, klm@umn.edu