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Re-Designing Digital Experiences to Reduce Carbon Footprint
5 min readApr 11, 2022
Could you plan your digital consumption based on the weather forecast?
Climate change conversations and actions tend to be centred on physical waste, but the reality is that digital activities also have a significant effect.
The internet has a high carbon footprint, and quite shockingly:
- The internet as a whole currently accounts for 2% of global emissions
- Digital services have a greater carbon footprint than the aviation industry
- Bitcoin’s annual consumption emits 22.0 to 22.9 metric tons of CO2 which equates to the levels produced in Jordan and Sri Lanka
- 100,000 monthly page views on a website generates 2,110 kg of CO2 per year — the same amount produced by 87 barbecue tanks
Tech giants are increasingly taking action to reduce the amount of CO2 emissions emitted to support the technologies at remote data centres processing vast quantities of information. Microsoft and Google are addressing this issue, both claiming their data centres are carbon neutral.
Here are 3 examples of how brands and experts are designing and re-imagining B2C digital experiences to reduce digital footprint:
