A Guide To Reducing The Carbon Footprint Of Your Internet Activities
Internet use continues to rise relentlessly with the growth of social media, streaming services, IoT, eCommerce and the rapid adoption of work at home practices. To put the scale of this in context, by 2022, the ITU(International Telecommunication Union) had estimated that 5.3 billion people, or 66 per cent of the world's population, use the Internet. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, that internet use accounted for 3.7% of global emissions, or the equivalent of the carbon emissions of all air traffic in the world for that year.
In 2022 Global data surpassed 100 billion Teraabytes per year, reaching a new historic record. This is expected to grow to over 180 billion Terabytes for 2025. Internet use is often the hidden environmental cost for most organisations. Based on conservative CO2/Gigabyte emissions, reports suggest that to offset this global usage would require the equivalent of doubling all the trees in Ireland every year plus annual exponential increases on top of that.
Understanding and addressing your organization's digital carbon footprint is an important component of cutting your Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions. In this article we will address the challenges and some helpful tips for reducing your business internet carbon footprint.
Calculating Your Internet Carbon Footprint
At the core of any policy is the understanding that the more data you transmit or consume, the greater your digital carbon footprint. But the metrics for calculating your emissions per GB of internet data is nuanced and requires a more careful look at a number of factors including intensity, send/receive device type, operating systems (OS), signal type (copper, fibre, 4G, 5G), and protocols (HTTP, MQTT etc.) For this reason, any guides we offer here are indicative only. We recommend that you engage with a suitable audit service or audit application that can best measure your particular usage patterns.
Websites
In today’s digital world, an attractive and informative website is a business essential. Of the 1.13 billion websites on the internet today (with over 200 million actively visited and maintained), climate-friendly websites are still in the minority but it is rapidly emerging as an issue in the business community. Your company website contributes a surprising amount to your digital carbon footprint. An average web page produces around 0.5g of CO2 per page view. But this footprint varies greatly among organisations. More complex websites require more data and consequently energy to deliver and load each page resulting in a greater climate impact. With faster internet speeds there has been an accelerating trend towards more media rich web content in recent years. A website with embedded autoplay videos can generate over 10g of CO2 per page view! An average company with 100,000 media rich page views per month could emit over 2 metric tonnes of CO2 per year!
Here are some tips to reduce your website’s carbon footprint.
Start With a Plan: The first step is to measure your site’s current data size and content and then use this benchmark to formulate a plan and set reduction targets.
Site Coding And Hosting: Is your current site coded efficiently? Is it built with static pages? Does it use a content delivery network (CDN)? CDNs work by having a copy of static files on each of its servers located around the world. This means that when a user accesses your website, these files are served from a local CDN server, meaning data doesn't have to travel as far. Reducing data transfer is better can be better for the planet. For website and media hosting, seek out operators with a high proportion of renewables in their energy mix.
Images are the one of the largest contributors to a website’s data size. The more images per page and the larger the image file size, the greater the website carbon footprint. For simple graphics and logos, use Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) images. For photographs use JPEGs that are a minimal acceptable pixel size and reduce their file size by compressing the image using a photo editor application like Photoshop or GIMP.
Video content is the largest contributor to a website’s data size. Videos are a powerful communication tool but must be carefully used to minimise their carbon footprint. Firstly, where possible, avoid using videos. When used keep them short. Keep the maximum video resolution as low as possible (720p or even 480p). Where videos are embedded, ensure autoplay is turned off and the playback resolution is set as low as is practical for watching (360p or 480p). Choose a video hosting service that best optimises their file size and delivery.
Downloadable documents should be kept short and to the point to reduce their file size. Avoid media rich documents as much as possible. Documents should be reduced in file size by compressing images and other embedded media before uploading. Alternatively, use vector artwork from the application’s own media library to significantly reduce the file size.
Typefaces: Avoid custom typefaces which must be downloaded to display the page properly. Instead, use system typefaces like Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, Times New Roman, Georgia, Garamond, Courier New, and Brush Script MT.
Page Count & Navigation: Reduce the number of web pages on your website. Be creative and develop a more minimal web structure and navigation. Delete or archive unused or rarely unused web pages after their useful life has passed. Unused pages still require emission intensive storage resources for rapid server access even when never used.
Social Media
The speed and ease of content creation has generated an enormous amount of data and a resulting digital carbon footprint. In 2017, every minute of the day, Snapchat users shared 527,760 photos, more than 120 professionals joined LinkedIn, 456,000 tweets were sent on Twitter, Instagram users posted 46,740 photos, 10,000 comments were posted and 293,000 statuses were updated on Facebook. This has only grown in the intervening years. Your contribution to this production and the user consumption of social media content contributes to your business digital emissions. But, by careful tracking, you can determine how much data your organisation generates and the time that is spent consuming your media. An hour of social media scrolling uses about 120 MB. For video rich media on YouTube, Facebook or TikTok this can rise to about 500MB per hour at a standard 480p setting. The aim of social media is to maximise viewership but steps can be taken to reduce the carbon footprint of your posts irrespective of the number of views. Reduce or eliminate the use of data intensive images and videos. Where they must be used, avoid uploading high resolution images and videos that must then be intensively resampled and compressed by the social media provider. Delete or archive historical or unwanted content regularly to reduce the amount of data storage resources needed by the social media provider.
Video Content
Video has become a key part of most business social media, advertising and training content. Video hosting with YouTube, Vimeo, Vidyard etc. are data intensive and should be used sparingly in order to reduce your business digital carbon footprint. The first important priority is to keep your videos short and to the point. When outputting your video, keep the maximum video resolution as low as possible. As smartphones and tablets are now the main media consumption devices, 720p or 480p is often ideal for most videos.
Video Conferencing
Video conferencing has become a vital part of day to day operations in most businesses and can eliminate the need for carbon intensive long distance travel and daily commuting making a work at home regime feasible. But, video conferencing can use a lot of data. A 1 to 1 Zoom meeting with video at the standard setting, for example, can consume just over 1 GB an hour. And the more people you add to the meeting, the higher the data usage. By switching off the video and going with voice only decreases data consumption by about 30 percent and more for other platforms. Other simple actions include limiting the number of participants and reducing meeting duration through careful agenda management.
Emails can be a highly efficient method of communication. Individually emails can seem to have a small carbon footprint, but, collectively they can have a significant environmental impact. Over 347 billion emails are sent and received every day worldwide. If everyone in the UK sent one less ‘thank you’ email, 16,433 tonnes of carbon could be saved each year. Attachments to emails are the biggest contributor to email emissions. An email with a one Megabyte attachmentduring its life cycle emits 20g of CO2. Twenty emails a day per user over one year, creates the same CO2 emissions as a car travelling 1000 km. For short messages, consider SMS messaging which typically requires just 140 bytes of data per message, This and other text messaging apps require less energy and produce less carbon emissions than an email.
Internet of Things (IOT)
Businesses are increasingly adding IoT devices to their premises. Probably the most data intensive of these are video surveillance systems such as a Nest camera that’s saving footage to the cloud. Setting the video resolution correctly has a major impact on data usage. At the lowest resolution, video cameras can generate about 18 GB per month. Medium resolution on a surveillance system will generate about 60 GB per month and at a high-resolution setting it will generate about 140 GB of data. Setting a lower frame rate can also have a big impact on the amount of data generated. Clearing old or unwanted video files regularly is also key to reducing your digital carbon footprint.
Web Searches & Browsing
If a web user makes an average of 2.6 web searches per day, this results in almost 10kg of CO2 equivalent each year. Of course web searches are a key productivity tool in any organisation. Educating staff about the emissions generated every day using the internet can help to change their search and browsing habits.
Conclusion
The internet is now a fundamental part of any business operation. Completely eliminating this source of emissions is simply not an option. But a few fast and simple changes to your digital operations can bring about significant savings in CO2 emissions. This is where education and introducing a sustainable culture within your organisation can bring about rapid and often low cost emission savings for your organisation.