How To Reduce Your Digital Carbon Footprint

When it comes to environmental issues we’re swamped with news about plastic pollution, aviation emissions and cutting back on meat and dairy. The latest Netflix series you’re watching, or the email you just cc’d to colleagues is likely not on your radar as something contributing to the climate crisis.

That’s probably because we rarely see what happens behind the scenes to make the internet work and we’ve coined terms like “surfing the web”, “the cloud” and “cyberspace” to manifest it.

The ephemeral sounding “cloud” is actually an estimated 100 million servers powering the internet. They exist in power hungry buildings requiring constant air-conditioned temperatures and enormous amounts of energy to run 24/7. Most of this power currently comes from fossil fuels.

One of the largest data centres in the world is in Reno, Nevada, USA. It is a 1.3 million square feet warehouse complex filled with powerful machinery. It’s also not particularly unusual in its size with other data centres around 1 million square feet too.

You’ll probably be surprised if I tell you that the annual carbon emissions of our internet activity and infrastructure surpassed that of the aviation industry back in 2018 and it’s growing every day. It’s equivalent to driving all 31 million cars in the UK all the way around the planet each year.

With the recent IPCC report detailing that global emissions for 2021 actually surpassed previous years and hit new records, it’s clear that things are not happening in the right direction fast enough and more changes to our individual actions and those of our organisations are needed to help.

Whilst there are plenty of reasons why we need changes at government level to push faster improvements, there are also lots of actions we can take to have a more positive impact and move the needle. After all, it is our behaviour that is often responsible in the end and, if enough of us make small changes, we can move the needle.

I write this from a position where purpose, planet and people are integral to our decision making processes and the actions that we take at Create. You might think it’s a bit strange that I, a person who has built a company that provides websites and hosting to small business owners, is drawing attention to the issue, but we all need to be more aware of how we can apply pressure on each of our industries to become greener.

As we all wake up to our environmental impact as individuals and businesses, there are actually lots of opportunities on the horizon to be ahead of coming legislation, supplier reporting and the eventual carbon taxes. It is good business, but it is also good for business too.

There is a lot of talk around net zero and carbon neutrality at the moment and lots of advice on how a business should measure and approach this. My aim in this article is to give you some simple practical steps you can take to reduce your digital emissions within your business. The more you reduce, the less there is to measure and actually a lot of it is common sense.

Reviewing The Digital Services You Use

We all use a lot of online tools these days for the work we do and these services will all be creating emissions. Whether it’s your accounting software, email marketing suite or social sharing tools, investigating what they are doing to limit their environmental impact is a good place to start. The key area here is understanding their own plans to reach net zero and reduce their emissions as this plays into reducing those of your business.

At Create we have a spreadsheet of all the services we pay for (including digital ones) and keep track of their progress. There have been some opportunities to switch to greener providers and moving forwards we include this criteria in our purchasing decisions. There is also a big opportunity for us all to start asking our providers what they are doing about this in their organisations so that it gets on more business agendas.

Greening Your Website

While we’re on the subject of providers, a relatively easy action is to switch to a website host running on renewable energy. Doing so will dramatically cut the emissions your business is responsible for in this area. Plus there’s a good selection of hosts around using renewable energy or REGO credits to ensure the power being used is from green sources.

If you’re not sure if your host is sustainable you can quickly check it by using our Website Eco-Checker (https://www.create.net/eco-checker) and if your host isn’t making commitments in this area consider moving providers.

Another big opportunity on your website will be optimising it for speed. This is done by using images that are the correct size and have been optimised, by looking at third party plug-ins (which can often be power intensive) and by being considerate about video use and not auto playing multimedia. Depending on how your website has been built there could also be potential code improvements or upgrades that can speed it up.

Optimising is important because a big portion of the emissions your website emits will be being generated by your visitors using it. These emissions will be through the data transfer across the internet to get to your visitor, and also if the visitor themselves is not using renewable energy. That means any optimisations you can make will reduce the power the site is using and the data transferred to visitors. This means less emissions overall.

Plus optimising is likely to give your SEO rankings a boost as loading speed is one of Google’s ranking factors. Which can be a big win for a business.

Look At What You Create And Store

Email is another area where it’s easy for us all to take action. Estimated email emissions vary from 0.3g for a very short email, to 50g if you add a big attachment. More if you CC in lots of colleagues. These may be individually small but as we all send so many we can make a collective difference. If everyone in the UK sent one less email each day we would save over 16,000 tonnes of carbon a year.

One of the easiest actions you can take is to delete old unneeded emails, clear a few each day and empty the deleted items folder regularly. Search your inbox for emails with large attachments you don’t need any more and delete those as a priority. As you’re deleting, consider unsubscribing from newsletters that aren’t relevant too. If you’re using an online email service then all your inbox stored in the cloud could be burning fossil fuels and is being synced back and forth between devices too.

Whilst we’re on the subject though, there are times when sending an email is better for the environment. If you tend to post letters and documents, consider if digital could do the job instead? Substantially less emissions would  be created.

The same tactics apply to files you store in online services like Sharepoint, Google Drive and Dropbox. If clients send logos and images, delete them when you’ve completed the work for them. It might be a slow burn, but it’s really easy to start deleting emails, documents, photos, graphics and more. When you think about what you really need to keep you’ll end up with a more productive environment to work in and after all who doesn’t want to achieve that elusive inbox zero?

Keep Your Tech Longer

There are the embodied carbon emissions from the production of the equipment that we buy to do our work. Apple claims the emissions of making and delivering the iPhone 11 are 63 kg and a 13 inch Macbook is around 326 kg CO2.

As a rule of thumb the bigger the piece of tech the more emissions will have been created during its production. Keeping it in use longer reduces your average annual footprint and is good for the accounting bottom line too. When you do need to replace, choose more energy efficient models to be better for the planet and save money on energy bills too.

Embedding Organisational Change

Whilst these changes to our behaviours help to reduce our own carbon footprints the biggest win is in encouraging this across teams and within our organisations. The creation of a Green Champion or Champions can be an excellent way to start thinking about this area.

There will be many actions that can be taken when you start to dig into your company’s carbon footprint, generally these also have an associated energy or resource saving, as well as importantly helping to fight climate change.

Rebecca Kimber
www.create.net

Eco checker tool
www.create.net/eco-checker

About Rebecca Kimber

Rebecca is an expert on websites and online marketing with over 20 years’ experience in the digital industry. Rebecca is passionate about having a positive impact on the planet and has been making changes to Create over the last few years to reduce its carbon footprint.

With a focus on enabling small business owners to design and manage their own websites, Create’s carbon-neutral hosting and investments into energy efficient technologies means that you can have a website that’s better for the planet and great for business too.