You probably know people leave a carbon footprint. But did you know websites do this as well? And what is the footprint of your website?

When we talk about a carbon footprint we’re talking about the amount of greenhouse gases that an activity, product, company or country adds to the atmosphere. See Wikipedia for more on this. These emissions are often referred to as greenhouse gases and directly attributed to climate change. For more details the NASA Science website is a good place to start and it details evidence of flooding due to rising sea levels and rising global temperature and the resulting effects, such as failed harvests and higher mortality rates are all blamed on greenhouse gas emissions (there are 4 different gases that contribute, not just carbon) It’s no surprise then that a good portion of the world is trying to do something about this. 

How big is the internet?

There’s an article on LinkedIn where the author goes through a series of calculations to provide a theoretical weight of all the data on the internet which is maybe ironically the weight of an apple. Not Apple itself, just a common-or-garden piece of fruit. Yet all the machinery that is made to carry this apple’s-worth of data is staggering. And, as is pointed out by Science Focus, estimates exclude corporate servers, backups, backups of backups, Dropbox, Barracuda and plenty of other services.

Whilst websites only appear on our computer (or phone) screens they have a home on a webserver, in a rack which is housed in a datacentre. So when we consider the carbon footprint of a website we’re mainly thinking about the energy required to host and serve that website. We could also think about the device that the website is displayed on because a website isn’t any use without an audience.

Green credentials

I get asked from time to time if my company uses green webhosting, and I answer based on what my webhosts tell me. For example, one host talks about being carbon neutral because all the webhosting exists “in the cloud”, but the cloud has to live somewhere, and that somewhere is a datacenter. How the datacenter is managed is a major factor in the claim but also consider how the business manages themselves. Solar-powered and renewable energy sources help lower the carbon footprint of providers. Being aware of where the energy used comes from and sourcing more environmentally-friendly energy makes them a much greener option.

Can we offset carbon emissions?

Carbon offsetting is a term we often see used, but what does that mean? In short it’s a means of countering greenhouse gas emissions by investing in projects that aim to reduce emissions elsewhere. There is a warning that comes with this kind of activity as it doesn’t cancel out the act of emitting greenhouses gases. As Greenpeace puts it, “Planting trees can’t replace slashing carbon emissions” and can lead to claims of greenwashing, which Green Intelligence defines as “Misleading customers or stakeholders into believing a company, product or service is doing more for the environment than it is...”

Isn’t it down to the webhosts to sort this out?

The IT industry is renowned for the amount of energy it uses with gadgets, computers, phones all using electricity, whether it’s being directly plugged into a power source, or by recharging batteries. There’s an even bigger debate about batteries and their environmental friendliness. But if we have to use electricity it had better be from renewable sources like wind and solar.

My webhosts use a cloud-based system provided by Google. And Google has a lot to say about the energy they use, and their commitment to clean energy. Every search and interaction uses energy after all.

But can all webhosting companies boast that they have matched 100% of the electricity consumption of our global operations with purchases of renewable energy, on an annual basis? And that they are looking to use completely carbon-free energy by 2030?

I’ve seen claims that the majority of power used for the internet still uses fossil fuels, but given the pressure businesses are under to be greener in everything they do, can this really be true? Krystal Hosting says: “It’s a fast-growing industry, but slow to change: most of this power is still generated from fossil fuel sources.”

Besides the energy used directly to power the web, there’s the energy used to cool the servers that host all of our websites. Hot servers don’t work well and will crash, so we need to keep them cool. But using big fans would be highly inefficient. Water cooling is much better and other practices such as cold aisle containment and free cooling chillers ( https://www.greenlivingblog.org.uk/best-green-hosting-services-uk/ ) make for much better energy efficiency.

What can I do?

I’m sat at home looking at a screen that’s been on all day, using electricity directly, with my room lit often by a lamp, warmed by a radiator. Having taken part in a questionnaire on Climate Hero I know I need to do more as a consumer to reduce my reliance on carbon-emitting activities.

There’s a lot more to say about this but for now, do a search and see how many companies come up as offering “green webhosting”, then read some more about what they actually do to help the environment.