Small green interactions

My girlfriend is a environmentalist and has recently finished a masters in environmental management. Recently i have been wondering what i can learn from her expertise and bring into my own profession of interaction design. The environment and interaction design instantly brings to mind a quote by a guy from Cooper (if only i could remember the guys name) at business to buttons in malmö 2 years ago.

"Just remember, while you are fiddling around with the details of your latest widget design. The earth is burning"

There is a broad scope for interaction design within the context of environmental issues. My thoughts have clutched hold of the idea of 'Small Green Interactions' within products and how the sum of millions of these interactions all over the world could impact the environment. Lets take a hypothetical example, i know mobile phones....let's go for that. Let's take the example of sending an SMS.

So, I am typing a message to my friend on my mobile phone. It takes me about 3 minutes to type the message. During the message the word prediction was often wrong, i made mistakes because the keys were too small for my thumbs and sometimes punctuation marks were never where i expected to find them.

Then extremely talented text input specialists come along (probably Sofia Broström and Anna Jacobsson at Sony Ericsson) and design the perfect typing solution. When using it the same message takes only 2 minutes to type. Now i am a happy user because my messages are quicker to type (one third quicker), send to my friends and i don't make many mistakes. Now here is a interesting question.....am I now a greener user?

Everything on a portable device relies on its battery which is charged regularly. All of these devices have a mode for saving power. They switch to this mode when they are not being used. Now with the new interaction design mentioned above the device would go into power saving mode a whole minute before the other solution. Now this may not sound like much but consider it on a worldwide scale. The USA alone sent 1 trillion(i don't even know how many zeros that is) text messages in 2008.......How much electrical power does that equal???

Now imagine other tiny interactions that could be made slightly more efficient and collectively save energy. Now imagine a polar beer running around happy on his iceberg.