When browsing the Internet, it’s easy to forget that the digital spaces we move through have consequences in the physical world. When it comes to the environment, major websites have a surprising footprint.
A research team from Payless Power has ranked about 50 popular websites according to their impact on the environment.
The results of this study are an interesting way to raise consumer awareness. While they don’t necessarily avoid a large e-commerce platform because of its digital storefront footprint, they realize that the small choices they make, whether it’s the brands they support , packaging, delivery times and methods, have a cumulative effect.
Methodology
The ranking system used to determine the rank of websites takes into account whether or not a site runs on sustainable energy, such as solar and wind power, the amount of CO2 a site produces per visit and per year, and the number of trees needed to absorb a site’s CO2 emissions.
Payless Power relied on the Carbon Calculator for its calculations.
The Carbon Calculator is a project of Wholegrain Digital, a sustainable WordPress agency. She highlights the importance of the internet’s carbon footprint: “The internet uses a lot of electricity. 416.2 TWh per year to be precise. To give you an idea, that’s more than the UK as a whole. From data centers to transmission networks to the billions of connected devices we hold in our hands, it all consumes electricity and produces carbon emissions equal to or greater than those of the global aviation industry .”
Crypto, games and e-commerce
The three worst websites for the environment in Payless Power’s test are BlockFi, GameStop, and (in the latest case of brick-and-mortar stumbling online) Nordstrom.
Crypto in general fared poorly, with the now-defunct site FTX also featuring prominently in the list and Crypto.com making the top ten.
More interestingly, NASA, whose website is rich in information, ranks 11th rank of the list. The Census Bureau site is not far behind, since it is “dirtier” than 81% of the other sites tested. Amazon is more polluting than 61% of the sites tested, but ironically it does better than the environmental administration of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).
The worst-ranked sites combine media-heavy pages with a lack of renewable energy.
Google pulls out of the game
Interestingly, Google is doing very well. The search engine produces the least CO2 of all the sites tested (5,480 grams per year). This result is not surprising, given the sparseness of Google.com’s homepage and the use of renewable energy in its web infrastructure.
For a full list of results, see the report here. And for a list of low-impact websites, check out websitecarbon.com’s list of websites.
Source: ZDNet.com