Should You Print, Save, or Search Your Recipes? The Carbon Footprint of Cooking Inspiration

When we look for new recipes, most of us either search for them online each time or save them in a personal cloud for easy access. Some people still prefer to print them out and keep them in a binder. But does one option really have a smaller environmental impact than the others?

To find out, we need to look at the “behind-the-scenes” infrastructure that supports these choices.

The Digital Foundations: Cloud vs. Online Search

Recipes can be accessed in two main digital ways: by searching online or by storing them in the cloud. Both rely on the same underlying infrastructure, which can be divided into three layers:

1. User devices — smartphones, tablets, laptops where the recipe is viewed.
2. Data centers — where information is stored and processed.
3. Networks — the Internet, both global and local, wired or wireless, that transmits data.

Both systems require hardware and energy across manufacturing, use, and end-of-life. There are, however, some meaningful differences:

• With an online search, the recipe is typically stored once on servers and accessed by many users.
• With personal cloud storage, the recipe is stored for your use only.

Online search can therefore have a slight advantage at the data-center level because the storage “cost” is shared across many readers. That advantage shrinks if you spend time clicking through multiple pages to relocate the same recipe each time.

Device Impact: The Bigger Piece of the Puzzle

What matters even more than how you access the recipe is what device you use and how you use it:

• Roughly 60% of the digital sector’s carbon footprint globally comes from user devices.
• About 90% of resource-depletion impacts are also tied to these terminals.

For example, if you spend ~9 minutes following a recipe on your smartphone, more than 90% of the footprint of that consultation comes from the phone—largely due to the energy-intensive production of semiconductors, often manufactured in regions with carbon-heavy electricity. Laptops are 3–5× more impactful per hour than phones. In short: smaller devices, used longer, and owned in fewer numbers matter far more than whether the recipe lives in your cloud or in a browser tab.

Generative AI: A New Factor

Using generative AI to locate or summarize recipes changes the picture somewhat. AI servers are energy-hungry: in 2023 they represented about 2% of the global server fleet but already accounted for ~18% of server electricity consumption. Depending on methods and system boundaries, estimates of a single AI query’s footprint can vary by up to two orders of magnitude. Even then, for a typical recipe lookup, your device usually remains responsible for over 80% of the total footprint of that consultation.

Printing: When Is It Justified?

Printing a single recipe has roughly 35× the carbon footprint of viewing it digitally, primarily due to paper production. It only begins to make sense if you reference the exact same recipe more than about three times per month—and at that frequency, you may simply memorize it.

Practical Ways to Shrink Your “Recipe Footprint”

• Skip printing unless you’ll truly consult the page very often.
• Optimize your device choices and habits:
  • Prefer smaller devices when feasible.
  • Extend lifespan (repair, update) or consider second-hand.
  • Own fewer devices; the global average hovers around six per internet user.
• Bookmark/favourite recipes to avoid repetitive, click-heavy searches.

Most importantly, keep it in perspective: the climate impact of looking up a recipe is tiny relative to the impact of the meal itself—recipe consultation is typically <0.1% of a meal’s footprint. If you want the biggest climate gains, focus on what’s on the plate: dishes with fewer animal proteins—especially red meat—can drastically cut impacts. A vegan dishoften carries ~4× less impact than a red-meat dish.

Don’t stress about cloud vs. search. Your device choices—and your ingredients—drive the footprint. Bookmark smartly, extend the life of your gadgets, and remember: the greenest recipe is usually the one with more plants at its heart.

This blog post is from a column presented on September 10, 2025 (french version) by Laure Patouillard, Research Associate at CIRAIG, in the program Moteur de recherche (Radio-Canada) hosted by Matthieu Dugal.

Bibliography

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C. Elsworth et al., “Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale,” Aug. 21, 2025, arXiv: arXiv:2508.15734. doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2508.15734.

P. Scarborough et al., “Vegans, vegetarians, fish-eaters and meat-eaters in the UK show discrepant environmental impacts,” Nat Food, vol. 4, no. 7, pp. 565–574, July 2023, doi: 10.1038/s43016-023-00795-w.