Our founder, Scott, was invited to join the Adventure Adventure‘s online Q&A session to talk about the carbon impact of digital technologies. The text below is taken from the two hour Slack conversation.
In this conversation, we covered the story behind Digital Carbon Online and why it was created — to turn awareness about digital carbon footprints into real action.
Summary
In this conversation, we explored the origins of Digital Carbon Online and its mission to turn digital sustainability awareness into action.
Topics included the environmental impact of the digital world — especially websites — and the difference between embodied and operational emissions.
We highlighted just how significant website-related CO2e can be, and practical ways to reduce it: switching to green hosting, choosing low-carbon platforms, and improving SEO and media efficiency.
The conversation also looked at the role agencies can play as leaders, educators, and stewards, helping clients make more responsible choices.
We touched on the growing energy demands of AI, the lack of transparency around its impact, and the need to use it wisely.
Finally, we covered how Digital Carbon Online supports ongoing emissions tracking, offers easy onboarding, and enables meaningful carbon reduction and removal — all while encouraging leadership through everyday action.
Do you want to start off by giving us some background and why you set up Digital Carbon Online?
Hello everyone. Thank you for the introduction and I’m very happy to be here.
So I guess the story starts around 2017 when I realised I’d been chasing job titles and pay rises, and needed to do something a bit more meaningful. I call this my “purpose awakening” but other — less kind people 😉 — have called it my mid-life crisis. At that point I started searching for how to combine my passion for tech & sustainability and launched wellthatsinteresting.tech.
Longish story shorter – I was invited to write a paper for the uk’s education sector on exploring digital carbon footprints and that led me to a realisation that there was lots of talk and no action – that’s when I decided to build digital carbon online, to give everyone an easy first step. If you’re interested in the paper, its still available for free here.
Can you frame what we are talking about here i.e. the impact of the digital world on carbon emissions?
Yes, sure. Essentially it all comes down to where and when energy is spent to do things.
Until (if) we ever end up in a world where all energy is renewable, every time we do something we spend energy and that energy has a “carbon intensity” the amount of carbon dioxide (or equivalent) CO2e that is emitted into the atmosphere for every kilowatt of energy used.
In the digital (or broader, tech) sense, we have CO2e emissions that fall into 2 categories; embodied and operational.
Embodied are those emissions that are ‘baked into’ the hardware (and software) during it’s creation. So for laptops, think about the energy used during mining and processing, assembly, shipping etc.
Operational emissions are those associated with the energy used to run these things. So for a laptop, the energy required to power the battery to power the processing, screen, storage, comms etc.
For tech, it’s common that over a 3 year period, 70-80% of the carbon emissions will have been baked in as embodied emissions before the device is even put into use that’s why the single biggest thing you can do to reduce your tech co2e footprint is use devices longer, avoid buying new stuff and where possible use refurbished/remanufactured.
Now, how big is all of this in reality ..?
It’s pretty big … if you add all the embodied and operational emissions associated with the internet it’s more than aviation, more than shipping and almost more than the two combined.
Put another way, if you consider it a ‘nation’ it would be the 4th most emitting nation.
Today that’s about 4% of the global emissions. By 2040 it is expected to rise to 14% … equivalent to the entire transportation sector today.
So yes, this ‘invisible’ thing we call the internet has a huge real-world impact. But it’s not greenhouse gas emissions, there are other impacts too. Water consumption is a huge one.
Host: That is amazing – I did not realise it was that big
No, not many people do. This is a big part of my work, raising awareness
Do you have figures around the impact that websites alone have?
Yes, let me give you some examples.
We’re currently working on a big study in the cultural sector and one of the websites in there is generating ~500kg of CO2e per month.
That’s one website. There’s 4.6 trillion web page views per year (ish)
Last year we did a back-of-a-napkin calculation on this which estimated 3.5 to 5.2 million tonnes of co2e just from web page views.
We’re going to revisit this later in the year because we have even more data to pull from now, and it seems a little lower than we’d now expect.
For one other site we tested, we estimated their web site emissions would be equivalent to burning more than 4,839 gallons of petrol …. per month.
So, we have established that websites are a big CO2 emitter – why is that? and what can be done to reduce this?
Luckily there’s quite a lot that can be done.
The first thing is to make sure your website infrastructure is running on renewable energy. One part of this is easy and has a big impact – your hosting provider. You can check if your host is using renewable using this link.
Moving to a green host can be the easiest big win (not for everyone, because some websites are much more complicated – for example if you’re using serverless tech for delivering websites, that can be a pain to move) but in general that’s the fastest way. Good hosts include our partners Krystal as well as Positive Internet. Outside of the UK, Green Geeks is apparently good.
Host: Nimbus Hosting was one green hosting company I have dealt with.
Choosing your website platform is one big one. Not all are the same, and even within the same platforms there are big differences. Our partner page shows different partners who deliver low-carbon websites using different technologies from wordpress, craft cms, and bespoke things like Sprout*
Then you get to the SEO side of CO2 reduction…
There’s a strong link between improved SEO and conversion performance and low carbon websites.
Simply put, many of the things you can do to lower the co2 footprint of a visitor journey through your website are also good for SEO & conversion. e.g. reduce content size to speed up page speed, eliminate unnecessary clicks/pages, make things clear, easy to understand focusing on reducing media size gives big gains.
The 500kg/month site I mentioned before has several unoptimised images on their homepage resulting in a single page being 48.1MB. Converting those to webp could lower the home page to <1MB. That would have a drastic impact on their website footprint.
We’ve got a list of tips and tricks here if you want to explore it further.
Attendee: Good SEO = reduced CO2e… well, there’s a no-brainer (great marketing for SEO businesses). These are great insights.
Yes, we’re working with a few SEO agencies and the synergy is brilliant.
In a convo yesterday, an SEO agency told us they’d like to work with us on a CO2-first approach to SEO improvement. Quite an interesting comment from an SEO agency, and we’re excited to help.
Host: CO2 First approach to SEO – I really like that.
We have covered hosting, website platforms and SEO – what other areas can marketing agencies start to think about to be more responsible when it comes to CO2 emissions?
There’s so many things we can do. Naturally some of them will be easier or harder for everyone.
As an agency, we have responsibility and control of CO2 emissions in many places … from our building, travel, food, WFH, pensions, and all the normal things you hear about… from a digital or tech point of view, I encourage you to look at the technology devices you use and choose refurbished where you can.
I’ve been using refurbished devices since around 2015. I’d say 98% of the time they have been as good (if not better) than new and are cheaper with significantly lower CO2 footprints. But also the actual marketing process has a big footprint.
These are some great insights and staggering numbers. In previous roles I’ve looked at different CO2e calculators. We wanted to make a small impact in our own way, but they tended to be things that just measure “after the event” and can feel like tick box exercise. What does Digital Carbon Online do differently.
There’s a few things we do differently, the two main ones that relate to this are the fact we monitor over time (so you can see what changes, where) and we use a dual methodology . It’s still an after the fact thing, however, with the continuous nature of the tracking it makes sure it’s not just a “do it once and forget about it” activity.
Also, we’ve worked with a few agencies on before/after site migration/optimisation comparisons for example, there’s this public one with National Museums Scotland.
Also the computing power to deliver AI and augmented reality is huge – this must have a big impact on CO2 – What is happening in the AI world to reduce the impact?
One of the biggest issues is there has been very little disclosure about the amount of energy required to build, train, learn, infer within the big AI models so there is vast speculation on the actual impact.
I spotted this article a while ago which had some “numbers” pointing towards 2.9Whrs of energy per ChatGPT, but the specifics of where that came from are ambiguous.
Estimations I’ve seen range from an AI query being equivalent to:
- 10x the cost of a Google search
- The same as boiling a kettle of water
- 50 times a google search
- and other bonkers figures
The problem is there is a dearth of hard fact data so there are lots of guesses. But that’s normal and to be expected in an industry that is emerging so fast.
My hope is that the Deepseek thing will give us some much needed data. The same hope goes with what WE7 are doing.
For now we work on the assumption that AI is significantly worse.
It might not seem much, but my approach is that AI is another tool. We should use it where it makes the most sense and not just because we can.
Last weekend I was converting a shipping crate into a raised flower bed. I could have used either a handsaw or a circular saw. I went for the circular saw because given the problem and the desired outcome it was the right choice.
The point is that AI can give us super powers or it can just be a huge waste (in many senses). Our job is to determine when the cost of the downsides are outweighed by the upside.
Not easy ….. and being made even less easy by the fact AI is being integrated willy-nilly into everything just because it can.
This is a classic story of human innovation – just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.
At Digital Carbon Online our general approach is to avoid AI if we can. We’ve tested a few things and have found that in general it still takes a lot longer to do things with AI than you think, and as such the costs add up.
One exception for me is coding. I see significant capability, quality and speed improvements when using AI to help.
However, AI to me is still often like a highly capable team member who went out the night before, is perhaps a bit worse for wear and just doesn’t give a **** today.
“Here’s your answer”
“Oh that doesn’t seem right”
“So sorry, please accept my apologies for the confusion, here’s the
corrected answer”
“That’s exactly the same”
“You’re right. Here’s the final corrected answer”
“Uhm, it’s still wrong”
“Would you like me to check my answers first”
“Please”
Why would Deepseek be leading the way?
Ah, sorry, yes, good question.
Deepseek claims to have come up with an OpenAI-beating solution at a huge fraction of the cost and time of OpenAi – if true, this means they could have achieved the same results with much less ‘consumption’ (people, energy, hardware). If true.
However even if not true since its open source, others can use it and study it to determine the energy requirements and therefore the co2 implications.
You have clearly highlighted that there is a huge issue, and there are some things that can be done. What is the role for agencies in this?
I think there’s room for leadership, education and support.
Leadership – get your own house in order and be open with what you do, what you learn (good and bad) and what impact that has.
Education – use your journey and experience as education.
Stewardship (I missed that one in the list) – help guide your clients on a more positive journey (I have some examples of how agencies are doing this).
Support – the 500kg/month website was built by an agency that knows how to do low-carbon websites, but once handed over the client, the client didn’t have the awareness. In this case on going support can provide continued education but also continued reductions.
Host: I believe agencies can be, and should be, Agents of Change. This is a great example of an area where every agency can help lead the way with their clients.
Re Stewardship – some of our agencies are taking the decision fatigue away from their clients by making Digital Carbon Online a mandatory part of the deal. The argument being “you came to us for low carbon websites, this tool keeps us and you honest on that”.
Where does Digital Carbon Online come in? What do you provide? How does it contribute to the CO2 reduction goal?
The primary goal of Digital Carbon Online is to help influence co2 reduction in websites.
Our secondary goal is to help organisations reach carbon neutral websites.
It’s pretty easy to get working, a small code snippet in the website, then we do all the rest.
Summarising the cumulative footprint of each and every viewed page over time, pointing towards which pages are causing the most emissions.
There’s a demo video here.
We provide the platform:
- An initial free report
- A 2 month audit package that agencies/companies use for before/after comparisons without subscription
- The full solution on a subscription basis
In addition to this we also enable automated sponsoring of carbon removals.
This is a big topic for us and we have a whole article on the difference between offsets and
removals. The article is here and we’ve just updated our portfolio of projects.
This is built in, but optional. Every month, if your site exceed a threshold we create an order on the portfolio and invite you to sponsor it. If you do, it’s shown in your private and public dashboard (if you publish that).
Oh, and of course …
We have an agency dashboard so agencies can see all the data for their clients, too.
Lastly, we’re very conscious not to be more a part of the problem than a solution, so we’ve made all sorts of decisions and processes to track, report and manage our own emissions.
What are the costs involved for agencies to get involved?
All the costs are on the pricing page. (But our Earth Day offer might be a good place to start).
We offer certain other benefits for agencies that either want to onboard a number of their clients in one go, or work with larger website clients (sites >500 pages).
But mostly, I want to say we love working with agencies and want to help you succeed in what has been a difficult year or two for many.
Host: What is Earth Day?
Earth Day is a reminder of the importance of environmental conservation and sustainability, encouraging us to come together and take action for a healthier planet and brighter future.
Attendee: Any tips on how we can best help with earth day for meaningful impact? Rather than performative?
It’s about action and awareness, so I’d say pick an improvement to make, one that you can commit to improving on an ongoing basis. One that you can continue to improve over time.
Tell people what you’re doing, why, and what impact you aim to have and encourage them to follow in your footsteps.
Lead by example, but not just for Earth Day, for every day.
Do it with integrity. Do it with transparency.
Do you have any parting comments for everyone that maybe we have
not covered? What is one simple step that agencies can do today?
Thank you, this has been a great conversation and my little fingers are quite beaten .
We’ve covered a lot and I hope it’ll lead to a few “aha” moments.
Further than that I’d love people to feel like they can move from Aha to Action on website emissions.
I’m sure many of you have tried website carbon calculators already, which is great. Maybe try out our free test to get a better sense of your holistic website footprint.
Other than that, we launched a LinkedIn newsletter this month, where we’ll feature updates, tips, ideas from us and others.