Eco-friendly websites

Eco-friendly Websites: 5 Things every Australian Should Know About the Environmental Impact of the Digital World

When we use the internet in our everyday lives, it is easy to forget the material dimension that underlies an otherwise seemingly immaterial digital experience. The internet depends on very concrete infrastructure, from the dizzyingly complex network of underwater cables that cross the oceans to the electric systems that fuel our personal devices and data centres which host the websites and platforms that we use on a regular basis. The internet implies a high environmental cost which we should keep in mind as users, designers, and web developers—particularly now that climate change has become a global concern. With this in mind, we bring you a brief list of 5 things you should know about eco-friendly websites and the environmental impact of the digital world.

#1 The environmental cost of the internet

When we think about which aspects of modern society are the most responsible for carbon emissions, we usually think about things like cars, air travel, industrial production, agriculture, not to mention the electricity requirement in our daily lives. When it comes to the latter, the most obvious culprits are intensively-used home devices, such as certain kinds of lightbulbs, fridges or heaters. We might consider the electricity that our personal computers use, throwing them in the same bag as these other electric appliances. However, few people think about internet usage itself as an important factor in global energy consumption and carbon emissions or consider eco-friendly websites as a possible solution.

The truth is, global internet usage emits a great amount of CO2 every year. According to a recent study by the Boston Consulting Group, the carbon footprint from the internet is around 1 billion tonnes of CO2 a year. This is equivalent to 2% of the world’s total emissions. Quite shockingly to many of us, this makes its carbon footprint higher than that of the aviation industry. If the internet itself was a country, it would rank sixth in terms of electricity usage!

 #2 The impact of NOT having eco-friendly websites

The internet’s carbon footprint has risen dramatically in just a few years from an estimated 300 million tonnes in 2010 to the current 1 billion tonnes mentioned above. To a greater extent, this is due to the sheer increase in the number of people using the internet as well as the average usage time. Approximately 4.1 billion people (which represents 53.6% of the global population) use the internet for an average time (in the 25-34 age group) of 3 hours and 45 minutes per day. This does not take into consideration those processes and activities which are connected to the internet and are always running in the background of your phone or laptop, such as geolocation, automatic updates and so on. On its own, a digital product or service can be potentially lighter in terms of carbon emissions than its ‘analogue’ counterpart. Still, when you multiply that by the vast number of internet users, its environmental impact can be significant. This is why the topic of eco-friendly websites is an important one in Australia and the world. 

The following numbers can help you understand the large energy consumption that our seemingly innocuous internet activities imply once you consider the number of people actively doing them on a daily basis. Streaming online videos accounts for the largest chunk—around 60%—of worldwide internet traffic In 2018, global Netflix usage amounted to 300 million tonnes of CO2, which is roughly equivalent to Spain’s yearly emissions. Likewise, the 1 billion hours of Youtube videos watched daily produce 600 tonnes, which is equivalent to 62 trips to the moon. Google claims that every search roughly amounts to 0.2g of CO2 (similar to what one tweet produces) and that one thousand searches produce as many greenhouse gases as the average car driven for one kilometre. It is estimated that sending one email emits 4g of CO2. A recent study claimed that over 64 million emails with pleasantries such as ‘thankyou’ or ‘cheers’ are sent every day in the UK and that if each adult sent one less of these emails, this would save over 16,433 tones of CO2 each year (equivalent to 81,152 flights from London to Madrid). An email with a photo or hefty attachment can climb to 50g of C02!

 #3 Tools to help you to measure the carbon footprint and ecological performance of a website 

Using tools to measure the carbon footprint of a website is especially important as a web developer or designer who is interested in creating eco-friendly websites. If you want to check how much CO2 is emitted by a specific website, you can visit WebsiteCarbon to get a general estimate. There you can also find some good examples of sustainable websites (all of them under the 0.4g CO2/page visit). Mightybytes has built a useful tool called Ecograder, which goes a step further and provides you with an overall score and a report with performance indicators that point towards things that could improve in that specific website, such as user experience, findability, and page loading speed. All of these matter when it comes to designing eco-friendly websites in Australia, which brings us to the next point. 

#4 The impact of good web design and hosting towards an eco-friendly website

When we think of reducing our everyday energy consumption, the most obvious answers might be switching to energy-saving light bulbs or choosing various energy-efficient home appliances. When it comes to internet-related energy saving, however, the options might not seem so clear. As individual users, there are few ways in which we can contribute besides, perhaps, sending less unnecessary emails, using ‘green’ search engines, and avoid leaving Youtube videos playing as background noise. However, things are a bit different if you happen to be a web designer or developer since your design and programming choices can proactively contribute to the existence of more eco-friendly websites.

In recent years web designers and developers have taken this urgent task seriously and have come up with ways in which the energy consumption and carbon footprint of internet usage can be effectively reduced. Although there is no standardised benchmark for digital sustainability or eco-friendly websites (yet), there are different methods and techniques which can be put to use for this purpose. 

Some of these involve factors external to the website itself, such as choosing an eco-friendly web hosting provider. These providers manage to lower carbon emissions through carbon offsetting, renewable energy-powered data centres, and energy saving-appliances. Other methods involve the actual design and contents of the web page itself. A streamlined webpage with clean graphic design and few heavy elements (such as gifs, graphics and animations) will keep the energy consumption to a minimum. Sites that load slowly draw more energy and so make frequent server requests. Other methods might include content strategy, performance optimisation, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy, ‘findability’, image compression and the use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

#5 Further reading on eco-friendly websites and the way of Wombat

If you are interested to know more about the topic of eco-friendly websites we can recommend Tim Frick’ book called Designing for Sustainability: A Guide to Building Greener Digital Products and Services. Here Tim outlines a range of techniques and efficient solutions to bring sustainable design to your work. 
Likewise, here at Wombat we have always kept environmental concerns at the forefront and have made it one of our priorities to provide our customers here in Australia as well as abroad with the necessary tools to build eco-friendly websites.

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