Websites & Sustainability
Today, digital often seems to be the solution to ecological problems. Indeed, we think that the carbon impact of an email is less important than a letter sent by post, or that browsing between different e-commerce websites is more responsible than driving to the city. But is that really the case? What is the real ecological impact of an e-commerce website?
First of all, It is important that we realize the ecological impact and more precisely the carbon impact of a website. To do this, go to your favorite website, copy the website URL. Then, type “WebsiteCarbon.com” in your search bar and paste the link on the tool. This online tool will allow you to have information about:
- CO2 emissions per page viewed and what it represents over a year.
- Annual energy consumption.
- The type of energy used by the hosting servers.
As an example, I chose the chanel.fr website, and here are the results I get when I searched its carbon impact.
In short, choosing to create a website to make your business greener is not that responsible. According to the online carbon calculator Website Carbon, the average website produces 1.76g of CO2 for every page view; so a site with 100,000 page views per month emits 2,112kg of CO2 every year. The more complex a website is, the more energy it requires to load — and the greater its climate impact. We have to imagine that this problem is multiplied by the number of existing websites. And the more websites there are with great functionalities, the bigger the impact is…
“The internet is essentially the largest coal-fired machine on the entire planet” — Jack Amend, co-founder of Web Neutral Project
Are there solutions to reduce the ecological impact of our website? The answer is yes.
For instance, the Google PageSpeed Insights tool allows you to obtain a precise analysis of the technical points to correct in order to optimize the display speed of a web page. As a reminder, a non-optimized page leads to a greater number of requests and a larger environmental footprint. Google PageSpeed Insights reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices, and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved. The tool provides both lab and field data about a page. Lab data is useful for debugging performance issues, as it is collected in a controlled environment. Field data is a historical report about how a particular URL has performed, and represents anonymized performance data from users in the real-world on a variety of devices and network conditions.
More globally, and from a consumer point of view, here are some tips to limit digital pollution:
- Empty your mailbox. Indeed, we know that emails consume a lot of energy and that has a heavy impact on our planet. If you don’t have the time to regularly sort through your emails, why not start by emptying your spam.
- Store your data locally (hard drive for example) instead of in the cloud. Indeed, when you store your data on the cloud, as soon as you want to access your data, it requires the servers to make many round trips in order to respond to your request. Keeping your data and memories on a hard drive does not require this kind of energy consumption, so don’t hesitate to choose this storage method.
- It is also possible to refer to website carbonbadges. The badge can be added to the footer of any website to automatically calculate and display the carbon emissions of each page
To conclude, it is our responsibility to be aware of the impact of our actions on the Internet. It is important to realize that not all new consumption methods are green. Indeed, sometimes companies put forward digitalization as a green and sustainable action, but isn’t it just a way to improve their brand image? Can we talk about green-washing or ignorance about the carbon impact of the internet?
So which website do you visit daily with the biggest ecological impact? And what actions will you take to limit your ecological impact?
Tell me in the comments!
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
