I’ve spent the last month trying to reduce the carbon footprint of the websites I have (some) control over. When talking about this with other people they often look at me blankly before asking “aren’t you taking this a little too far?”.
All of my WordPress plugins combined run on well over 2 million different websites, each website receiving who knows how many visitors.
At an average energy expenditure of 0,5 kWh per GB 1 of data transfer this means that every kB equals 0,5 kWh / 1.000.000 kB * 2.000.000 websites = 1 kWh if each of these websites received exactly 1 visitor.
Let’s assume the average website receives about 10.000 unique visitors per month and serves files from cache for returning visitors. The total amount of energy saved by shaving off a single kilobyte is then 1 kWh * 10.000 visitors = 10.000 kWh.
10.000 kWh of energy produced by the current European electricity grid equals about 10.000 * 0,295 = 2950 kg of CO2.
Shaving off a single kilobyte in a file that is being loaded on 2 million websites reduces CO2 emissions by an estimated 2950 kg per month.
To put this into perspective, that is the same amount of CO2 saved each month as:
Driving my Toyota Yaris for 18.670 kilometers. (158 g CO2 per km)
5 flights from Amsterdam to New York. (679 kg CO2 per flight)
Eating 118 kg of beef (25 kg CO2 per kg of beef)
I already work from home, am a vegetarian and didn’t take any flights in the last 3 years so it seems I am stuck trying to make the web more efficient.