by Janus Boye
The Internet has a larger footprint than the airline industry, yet we continue to build new digital marketing campaigns, launch new domains, use high resolution for video calls and insist on impressive visuals on our digital presence.
Fortunately, thinking about website carbon reduction is actually a win/win. James Cannings is Chief Sustainability Officer at digital agency MSQ and has been working with environmentally sustainable digital leadership for longer than most.
In a recent member conference call, he shared how sustainability also impacts our digital work, where to start, and the 3 layers in building for sustainability. In this post, you’ll find my notes from the call, the slides, the complete recording and links for your to make progress on your digital sustainability journey.
How do we measure the footprint?
As James said early on:
Measuring the carbon footprint of the Internet is not easy
There are so many different variables in the equation, but studies show that the Internet accounts for about 1.9 and 2.3% of the total carbon footprint. Some, like Small World Consulting which is based at Lancaster University, estimate that it is higher and almost 4% by also counting the entire lifecycle of resources (laptops, smartphones etc.) and the transport of those. According to numbers from Greenpeace, the IT sector consumes an estimated 7% of global electricity.”
If you want to look at how much carbon your digital presence used, James recommended a service called websitecarbon.com. They host a free of charge carbon calculator to way to find out how your website is impacting the planet.
Here’s just a few websites to illustrate how much CO2 is produced every time someone visits a web page:
siemens.com: 1.04g of CO2
sueddeutsche.de: 1.86g of CO2
ubs.com: 0.94g of CO2
If you use the calculator, it also translates this carbon footprint into more tangible measures. Like enough electricity to drive an electric car 1,525km or the amount of carbon that 6 trees absorb in a year.
Preaching sustainability the wrong way
To put things in perspective, James asked why a client would bother?
He used one of MSQ’s larger UK-based clients as an example and shared a few interesting numbers, which showed that the entire carbon footprint of their corporate website is less than 0.1 % of their total carbon footprint.
Still, it makes sense to embark on the environmentally sustainable digital leadership journey. As James said there’s a good case to be made for the win/win of website carbon reduction and he illustrated it by these examples:
Simplifying a user journey will usually improve conversions
Making pages load faster will always improve conversions
Halving the steps in a user journey will half the carbon footprint
Halving the page weight will half the carbon footprint again.
Also, he made the good point that customers like to know the impact of what they are doing and we can all do our bit to tackle a footprint larger than the airline industry.
Where to start?
A few organisations have started not only measuring their digital carbon footprint but also offering so-called green pages. These are pages that don’t load unnecessary images and offer a rather minimalistic digital experience but also greatly reducing the carbon footprint.
One such example is Organic Basics, a producer of eco-friendly underwear, activewear and essentials. To quote from their story on their website:
“The fashion industry is a dirty bastard.”
They also have an Organic Basics low impact website, which looks like this:
A screen shot from the Organic Basic Low Impact website - tap to learn more, accept cookies to save energy and worth a visit.
Besides green pages or low impact websites, James also shared 3 layers to build for sustainability:
Can we reduce the digital footprint of our platform?
Does the use of the platform have emission benefits? Can we measure it? Can we think about that when we do our customer experience mapping? Can we tell the customer?
Can we change the experience based on grid emissions?
What’s next?
At the moment, the world is missing guidelines for building digital sustainable websites. Hopefully, standard organisations or the international community will soon produce something similar to accessibility guidelines, to both help organisations on the journey, but also raise the bar and avoid making the Internet a worse carbon culprit.
James predicted not only the arrival of standards, but also more widespread adoption of green mode. Considering MS Teams or Netflix as examples, why do they also need to transmit video in the highest resolution? When you are browsing what to watch on Netflix, perhaps it could be with less visuals and constant movie previews to save carbon?
Learn more about environmentally sustainable digital leadership
There’s quite some activity in this area. Earlier this year, Hamburg-based sustainability expert Christina Rahtgens hosted a call that looked broader on the sustainability journey titled Sustainability - What Do I Need To Do?
You can also join our UX Connect Aarhus 23 conference in June. James Cannings is among the speakers alongside Hannah Smith (Training and Operations Manager at The Green Web Foundation) and Thorsten Jonas (founder of The Sustainable UX Playbook) and many others.
In the UK, Tech Zero is building a global community of innovative UK tech companies taking climate action and recently passed 100 companies as members. Also, from the UK, the BIMA Sustainability Council offers The Green Pages with resources for understanding, measuring and reducing the environmental impact of the digital industry. Also from the UK, software vendor Little Forest is working on Introducing a Sustainability Score for Websites.
Finally, you can also download the slides (PDF) from the talk or lean back and enjoy the entire 29-minute recording below.