Greening the web
The internet will soon be responsible for nearly 1 billion tonnes of CO2 or 10% of global electricity usage. 100 million websites account for 9% of total electricity consumption in the United States. The average webpage size is 3.48 Mb which is more than 20 times the size it was in 2003.
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
Electricity Consumption:
Cloud Computing vs. Countries
| Canada | The Cloud | USA |
|---|---|---|
| 519 | 522 | 3790 |
Electricity in billion kWh
The rise of streaming video is driving significant growth in our online footprint, and in power-hungry data centers and network infrastructure.
Why is this a problem?
It’s not a problem if we want to leave the world a hot and dire mess to our children and their children. Climate change will make the lives of all humans and species much, much more difficult.
- 35% of all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions comes from dirty electricity.
- 100,000,000: people living in coastal regions will be displaced by just a one-yard rise in sea levels.
- 17 of 18 of the warmest years in the 136-year record all have occurred since 2001.
- 92 km3: of glacier ice are being lost globally per year.
If we continue to power our websites, applications, digital tools, archives, and data collections with non-renewable energy, we are contributing to the warming of the planet.
How can you make a difference?
Here’s the incredible thing: compared to architecting green transportation and engineering heat-resilient crops, it’s not very hard to green our data. There are many things we all can do to to make sure that the apps we build, the data we share, and the sites we visit are both people-friendly and planet-friendly.
Business Owners:
Use green hosting for websites and apps
Work with a sustainability advisor
Consider joining the B Corp movement
Designers and Developers:
Discuss data usage with your clients and colleagues
Use less code and create clear page budgets
Review page bloat on older websites and applications
Sustainability Executives:
Work with stakeholders to demand hosting providers go green
Take data usage into account for assessing carbon footprints
Support Greenpeace's work in evaluating internet energy demands
App Developers and Engineers:
Check products consistently for performance improvements
Use a CDN to deploy content and assets whenever possible
Help support the development of green hosting platforms
WIND:
Kaheawa Wind Power is one of the largest wind farms in Hawaii. It is located on the island of Maui above the town of Maalaea in the West Maui Mountains and serves 18,700 homes.
SUN:
The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is the world’s largest solar thermal power plant. It is located in the California Mojave Desert and has a a gross capacity of 392 megawatts (MW).
WATER:
Hoover Dam can produce over 2,000 megawatts of capacity and a yearly average generation of 4.5 billion kilowatt hours to serve the annual electrical needs of nearly 8 million people in Arizona, southern California, and southern Nevada.
EARTH:
The Svartsengi Power Station is an Icelandic geothermal power plant that is located in the Svartsengi geothermal field. It is the only heating system for the local district on the Reykjanes Peninsula, which pipes hot geothermal water to more than 21,000 households. Geothermal power facilities currently generate 25% of Iceland’s total electricity production.
Want to take some immediate action but don’t know where to start?
Here are four things that we recommend:
1- Find a green host for your site or application. There are a lot of them out there. This site is powered by a host that only powers its servers with electricity from renewable energy sources (in Iceland) and works to achieve high energy utilization efficiency levels. You can learn more about renewable-powered and carbon-neutralized hosts at the Green Web Foundation.
Find a green host: https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/
Estimate your web page carbon footprint: https://www.websitecarbon.com/
2- Plug your website into Ecograder or Pingdom Tools and see what the results are. You’ll find a lot of tips for making your site faster, more energy efficient, and more search engine friendly.
Try EcoGrader.com and Pingdom Tools
https://ecograder.com/
https://tools.pingdom.com/
3- Petition your website host to adapt to standards and transparency in green hosting. As we consciously create a more sustainable planet, every business will need a reliable, standards-based, visible, and user-friendly set of tools to determine whether their websites and applications are being powered by renewable or polluting energy.
4- Ask your designers, developers, engineers, and CTO about how your data is being served and whether performance and efficiencies are measured. Are your servers powered by green energy? If not, why not?
Greening the web will take you and many thousands of others to make simple changes and some hard choices about how data is delivered.
We are an international group of developers, designers, B Corps, business owners, data hosts, UX geeks and sustainability experts that care about the future of the world, the future of the web and—why not—the wideness of it all as well. We are a small but growing group of professionals who not only build the web but are also looking to make it greener. Much greener. Consult or use: https://serving.green/ or #servinggreen
Beyond checking the box
How to create business value with embedded sustainability: What’s good for the world can also be good for business.
Yet, six in 10 executives say they have to make trade-offs between financial and sustainability outcomes.
Based on our survey of 5,000 C-suite executives across 22 industries and 22 countries, the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) has determined that if organizations flip the way they operationalize sustainability, they can significantly increase business value. The key is to embed sustainability throughout the business—truly bake it into operations—rather than treat it as an add-on.
A few ways organizations that embed sustainability increase business value
16%: higher rate revenue growth
52%: more likely to outperform their peers on profitability
2X more likely to attribute great improvement in operating costs from their sustainability efforts
What embedding sustainability looks like: when you embed sustainability, it becomes a business transformation accelerant versus what it is in so many organizations—a reporting or accounting exercise.
According to our research, spending on sustainability reporting exceeds spending on sustainability innovation by 43%.
Becoming more sustainable—rather than merely “doing sustainability”—entails a shift toward embedding sustainability across the enterprise and making it a core part of all the activities that add up to long-term value creation. Embedders are actually more exacting than other organizations on tying sustainability to business value; 53% of these organizations say that business benefits are essential for justifying sustainability investments.
Embedded sustainability means breaking sustainability out of its functional silo and integrating it across every business unit, in particular the core functions and workflows. That will help make sustainability part of the corporate DNA and ways of working. To learn how to address each of the three main challenges, as well as how leaders are doing so around the world, download the report below. We share how organizations in a variety of industries are creating business value through sustainable solutions, as well as what a redefined role looks like for Chief Sustainability Officers.
The 3 main challenges to embedding sustainability:
Two ways to host applications
| Containerization | Virtualization |
|---|---|
| Containers share single OS | Can run multiple OSs at once |
| Maximum portability | Maximum flexibility |
| Resource efficient, measured in MB | More resource intensive, measured in GB |
Links
- IBM Furthers Commitment to Climate Action Through New Sustainability Projects and Free Training in Green and Technology Skills for Vulnerable Communities
- IBM and Morning Consult IT Sustainability Skills 2023
- IBV Beyond checking the box
- Perspectives on climate resilience and sustainability: Helsinki