Greening the Web: How We Can Create Zero Carbon Websites

[mouakter13]

Whenever I talk about the subject of greening the internet and reducing carbon emissions from websites, people often look at me blankly before asking, “Do websites even produce carbon emissions?”

We tend to think of the internet as being clean and immaterial. There has been a big drive to take services online not just to improve efficiency and user experience, but to reduce resource consumption and environmental impact. However, there is a growing body of evidence that the internet has a very real environmental impact, even if we can’t see it.

Energy consumption and emissions from the internet are huge. Electricity is the lifeblood of the internet, being used to power data centres, telecommunications networks and the devices that we use to surf the web. In total, the global internet uses more electricity than the whole of the United Kingdom (416.2 terawatt hours of electricity per year to be precise).

This translates into a lot of carbon emissions. In fact, 2% of global belize phone number data carbon emissions come from the electricity used by the internet. Such as data centers used by big corporations. That’s equivalent to the amount of carbon from the global aviation industry, which most people think is one of the worst polluting industries. To put it in perspective, if the internet was a country, it would be the sixth worst polluter in the world, equivalent to Germany.

Data Center
Data Centers produce a lot of carbon emissions
Unlike many other industries that are pursuing efficiency and driving emissions down, emissions from the internet are set to rise rapidly in the coming years. The number of people globally with access to the internet is increasing, and as data gets faster and cheaper, we are all consuming more. Streaming services such as YouTube, Netflix and Spotify are heavy data users and are growing fast, but even ordinary websites are getting more and more data intensive.