How Green is the Internet? An Uncomfortable Truth

How green is the internet? You may not like the answer. Here’s a presentation we made a few months ago. There’s good news and bad news.

It started as a question – I’ve got a presentation to make and no subject. Like most people, we worry about the environment so we thought we’d challenge ourselves. A mini audit if you wish.

We didn’t like the answers and here’s the result.

We’re all using the internet all the time, often without knowing it and often on several devices at once. Individual transactions may not consume much energy but there are just so many of them.

Everyone wants their internet fast. Just like they want their fashion cheap. Fast fashion means sweatshops and exploited workers. Fast data mean vast server farms and exploited power grids.

Data centres consume a lot of power; they represent a huge proportion of the power used and the carbon created whenever you use the internet.

If you want to minify the environmental impact of your website, picking a carbon neutral hosting provider is a great place to start.

Just because your electricity comes from windmills, doesn’t mean your hosting providers’ does or the datacentre beyond that and beyond. Under some cirumstances your data may be stored overseas, where environmental controls are even weaker.

We pursue strategies to make our websites ever more sustainable and we think you should too.

So how green is the internet? Not at all and it’s up to all us to make it better never forget a greener internet is a better internet. If your developers cannot create a website which is:

• Well designed and easy to use
• Fast
• Efficiently coded
• Hosted without harm to the environment

then you should talk to us. If not us, the someone like us.