We have embarked on a mission here at Applikation to address the growing impact the internet and digital products have on the environment. This article will out line the problem of digital carbon emissions and look at solutions that can help us track and reduce our digital carbon footprint.
Going digital is considered a greener option to traditional methods of business, but how green is it? The internet produces carbon emissions equivalent to the entirety of Russia (an estimated 1.5 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions) so as a whole it has a significant impact on the world around us, more so than the entire aviation industry.
So, why are we not considering the environmental impact of our websites? Visibility. The lack of visible analytics on the impact of our websites environmentally is surprising. Especially, when you consider the countless tools and Saas products out in the market that track every other aspect of our digital products. Think Google Analytics for user interaction tracking. Think Meta for social conversion tracking. Think Salesforce for sales tracking.
Another factor is ease of creation, how easy is it to produce a website? AI has rendered it a simple 1 min job, platforms that can build you a website from a few prompts, such as https://10web.io/ai-website-builder/. Pre-AI (yes it existed) websites were on average created every 3 seconds. What’s that number going to look like in 1 years time, 5 years time, 10 years time? The average human development time is around 1-2 months. AI is producing them over a million times faster (that’s 1 every 0.000003 seconds – for those that are interested).
Now, although AI is exacerbating the problem currently, we believe it has the potential to be the solution. It’s ability to analyse data quickly and surface unconsidered solutions to complex problems means it has the potential to allow a mass market product to be built that can take real-time real-user data and recommend improvements to a website’s carbon output. Traditionally, it would require an ESG expert to review your website, which could take days or even weeks – AI can do it in minutes. A huge number of small improvements can result in a momental shift, allowing digital to be the green alternative it was initially intended to be. One small step, one giant leap and all that! The combination of ease and opaqueness has resulted in us heedlessly producing and updating websites. Assets and files are regularly updated by people who aren’t even aware their actions have an environmental impact – that’s not your fault. There needs to be education to explain this to any digital or marketing manager as well a developers to ensure they understand the repercussions of changing something as simple as an image.
Biosites has a solution. Biosites offers a holistic solution to the internet emissions crisis. It allows customers to track their website’s real-time real-user emissions in a transparent and clear way. It’s cost effective, as not only is it significantly cheaper than sustainability agencies, it means that the solution can be used by any website owner or development team meaning a larger environmental impact can be made. It provides AI-driven recommendations to improve your carbon emissions, meaning they’re helping you fix your website at source rather than offsetting the carbon output, which only masks the problem. They have developers that are trained in eco-friendly development that can action the recommendations for you. Meaning we now have a platform that will track, recommend and implement eco-friendly changes to your website.
Exactly what the world needs.
