Understanding your impact: The Environmental Impact of Websites and Digital Sustainability

How do websites impact the environment?

It’s widely understood and accepted that the things we do physically have an impact on the environment and may have a carbon output, but what about the things we do online? Does surfing the web, saving photos in the cloud, watching videos on YouTube and scrolling on social media have an impact? The short answer is yes. Websites and other digital platforms have a significant environmental impact through their energy consumption, carbon emissions, and resource usage, and the need for digital sustainability is becoming ever more acute.

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Websites’ Energy Consumption - Data Centres

Data centres, the backbone of the digital infrastructure, are physical buildings found all over the world and use a huge amount of energy. They house numerous servers, data storage devices, and networking equipment, all of which require continuous power to operate efficiently. The heat created by these devices running constantly means that data centres also need to use a lot of energy to keep them cool - around 40% of the energy they use is for this. Power distribution units are also needed to ensure uninterrupted electricity supply so that society doesn’t experience internet outages.

The increasing reliance that we have on the cloud to save all of our personal photos, videos and documents, and the massive growth of online activities have increased? energy requirements in data centres, as well as increased the number of data centres needed across the globe. As of 2023 there were 9,380 data centres globally - the country with the most data centres is the US with 5,375, followed by Germany with 522, and the UK with 517. In 2021, research suggested that there were nearly 8,000 data centres globally, that’s an increase of 17.2% in just 2 years. More worryingly, an article in the New Scientist suggests that the AI boom and increasing internet activity may mean that between 2024 and 2026 the electricity demand from data centres could double.

?The collective energy consumption of data centres has become a pressing concern due to its significant environmental impact, contributing to carbon emissions and exacerbating climate change.

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What if the internet was a country?

?There truly is a staggering amount of energy consumption associated with websites. Studies suggest that websites collectively consume enough electricity to equate their energy usage with that of entire countries. A report by the International Energy Agency indicated that data centres and digital services consumed around 1% of global electricity in 2020. A decade ago in 2014, the internet was ranked as the fifth largest ‘country’ in terms of energy consumption as well as using the same amount of energy as the entire aviation industry, and as of 2024 the internet is fourth, behind China, India and the United States.

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How much carbon does one website produce?

Determining the exact carbon footprint of a single website is very complex and varies based on lots of factors such as its size, the amount of traffic it gets, and the hosting infrastructure it uses. Depending on these factors, a small website with little traffic could emit a few kilograms a year, and a very large website with lots of traffic could emit several tons of CO2 annually. At Footprint Digital, we work with our clients to measure the amount of carbon emitted from their websites through our Digital Carbon Footprint Audit, and then provide them with recommendations for how to reduce the amount of carbon that their website uses.

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What can we do to become more digitally sustainable?

?As consumers, being sustainable online or offline is always about being more mindful. In the physical world we might decide not to buy certain things, or travel in certain ways to reduce our impact. In the online world, we could decide to send fewer emails, unsubscribe from mailing lists, upload fewer photos and videos, watch fewer TikToks, and take a break from constant internet usage. The less we use the internet, the less our personal impact will be.

?As businesses or website owners, we have the responsibility to ensure that what we’re doing is as sustainable as possible. Do we really need to send out emails to our list of thousands of addresses every day? Could we be using green hosting for our website? Are all of our social media posts necessary? Are we uploading images in a much higher resolution than necessary? How much waste are we creating online? If we all started answering these questions and seeing the internet as a very real thing, rather than an abstract concept, then we would be well on the way to being more digitally sustainable. A proactive way to do this is to get in touch with Footprint Digital about getting a Digital Carbon Footprint Audit for your website, which will benchmark your current carbon emissions, give you consultative advice for reducing your impact, and reassess your carbon output in six months time to document your improvements.

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