I began by analysing the environmental impact of technology, including production of tech and the European-wide impact of using digital services eg the internet and websites. I came across a study done by Danny Van Kooten, a software developer. He takes two million websites and assumes the averagewebsite receives about10.000 unique visitors permonth and serves files fromcache for returning visitors.

Shaving off a singlekilobyte in a file thatis being loaded on2 million websitesreduces CO2 emissionsby an estimated 2950 kg per month. This is equal to...

But what's actually causing these emissions? The Web Almanac evaluated the environmental emissions of websites, starting with page weight. Comparing page weights on mobile and desktop, they noticed that the difference between them is small, which seems surprising. Media should be served in an appropriate size and format depending on the size of the screen. They picked up that carbon emissions for websites are very close on mobile and desktop, and even though the carbon produced per view is a small amount, the environmental impact each month for all websites adds up. On these websites, images and JavaScript are the more impactful but images get even more impactful as you go to upper percentiles. Processing JavaScript is usually more impactful than images.

Tim Frick of Mighty Bytes observes that those of us who build the web for a living have a responsibility to make it as efficient as we can and power it with renewables when possible. If every one of the more than half-million agencies worldwide committed to building lightweight digital products similar to USA Today‘s GDPR site, for example, we could significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions warming up our planet