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Show HN: Our Favorite Websites Are Contributing to Climate Change
If the internet were a country, it'd be the 7th most polluting. In the past 10 years alone, websites have grown 320% heavier.
This website presents an analysis of the hidden cost of the internet's top 250 websites, comparing their carbon footprint & their yearly environmental impact.
Our analysis shows that 40% of these websites generate significantly more than the global average of 0.5g CO2 per page load — some up to a whopping 16g.
Compounded by millions or billions of visitors, they unnecessarily generate about 234,342,373kg (515M pounds) of CO2 every single year. This is the same as a gas car driving around the Earth 23 million times. We'd need around 4 billion trees growing for 10 years to absorb this amount.
There are plenty of ways to reduce a website's emissions. For example, if all the analyzed websites were using a green host, the overall emissions would be 76.15% lower. That's a HUGE reduction with relatively little effort.
However, most companies choose profit over the planet.
- betsubara 4y agoY'all are tech-savvy and probably asking yourself: how about CDNs? And geographies? And are homepages really a good proxy for this? We wrote a little bit about this in the "How this works" section. Providing an accurate measure is impossible without having access to their internal analytics. However, this estimation helps us get a perspective on which companies are making an effort (through highly optimized landing pages & usage of green hosts) and which ones aren't; and raise awareness around ensuring folks like us, technologists, are making the right trade-offs.
- easytiger 4y agohow have you derived the share of energy sources powering various websites?
- betsubara 4y agohey! we wrote a little bit about this on the "How this works" section, here you go: These CO2 emissions were estimated with BACKSPACE, a carbon analytics platform for websites. If this is the first time you're hearing about the internet's CO2 emissions, here's a quick primer: a website's energy consumption and subsequent CO2 emissions are calculated based on how much data was transferred in a visit, and the energy source the hosting provider uses. You can learn more about it here https://beta.backspace.eco/help#calculation https://beta.backspace.eco/help#calculation and here https://sustainablewebdesign.org/calculating-digital-emissions/ https://sustainablewebdesign.org/calculating-digital-emissio... let me know if you have further questions!