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Digital column | We need to look at digital carbon footprint
There are quick wins, says Kevin Gosling
News that a “washing-machine-sized” data centre is heating a 25m swimming pool in Devon illustrates the huge amount of energy powering our digital lives. Every email, page view and download uses energy. The internet causes almost 4% of global carbon emissions – more than air travel.
At the Collections Trust, we try to reduce the impact of our digital activity. Our website is now hosted on a server certified by thegreenwebfoundation.org. If your hosting provider isn’t green, find one that is.
If you are commissioning a website, there are green-minded developers that can make it energy-efficient from the outset. If you already have a site, audits.digital is another useful resource. Type in the URLs of your most-visited pages and it will provide a breakdown of how much energy it takes to get the content to your users, along with tips on how to improve.
There are quick wins. Removing a decorative strip of images from our default template saves about 1.5MB of data being hauled through cyberspace with every page view. Halving the height of the homepage, and turning the six images into WebP format, saves more than 2MB every time that page is accessed – a 66% reduction.
With the help of our developer, we’ll keep tweaking our site and blogging about the impact on its carbon footprint.
Kevin Gosling is the chief executive of the Collections Trust