How To Make Your Website Carbon-Neutral
photo credit: MrsMinifig
For anyone who cares about the environment yet runs their own website there is always an uneasy trade-off. Certainly allowing your visitors to access information via the interner rather than in printed form helps to reduce carbon emissions by reducing paper use. And using eco web hosting will ensure that the server your web host runs on is carbon neutral.
Furthermore there are a number of ways to reduce the amount of energy that your website itself uses when people visit but there’s still one more sticking point.
The one element missing from this carbon neutral equation is simply the amount of energy that your site visitors use simply by having their computer on and accessing your website. Ironically when you consider it, the better your website is the more visitors you will likely be receiving and so the worse the problem will be. It’s entirely possible that those of us working hard to share tips on how to be eco friendly and drawing fresh visitors every day to our message may be doing as much harm as good.
Fortunately though there is a simple, low-cost way to make your website totally carbon neutral – which even includes the power your visitors are using to access your site.
A number of non-profit organizations are in existence whose aim is to enable you to offset your website’s carbon emmissions by recording the number of visitors your website receives each month and then offsetting the carbon emmissions these visitors cause through the purchase of carbon offsetting and renewable energy certificates.
GreenScroll
GreenScroll is a Canadian non-profit organization which offsets not just the non-renewable energy that your web host uses but also the energy consumed by visitors viewing your site. At the time of writing GreenScroll claims to have offset the carbon emissions from over 800,000 page views which is not only a thoroughly impressive statistic but also helps to illustrate just how much interest there is in making the internet a greener and more sustainable experience.
But it’s not just your website that GreenScroll will help to make carbon-neutral – they also enable any internet user whether they have a website or not to neutralize the energy used in sending and receiving daily emails. Signup for both of these services is both incredibly simple and surprisingly cost-effective for most low- to mid-traffic websites.
CO2 Neutral Website
Despite their rather difficult to navigate website and unwieldy name CO2 Neutral Website has very similar aims to GreenScroll but in contrast to GreenScroll you buy your “carbon credits” on an annual basis rather than a monthly basis.
While this will no doubt increase the non-profit’s initial turnover helping them to kickstart the range of sustainable projects they invest in there are two potential problems with this model.
The first of these is the larger upfront investment required by environmentally friendly website owners meaning many website owners who may otherwise have been interested in offsetting the carbon emmissions of their website may balk at the costs and so back out gracefully.
The second potential issue is that the traffic that websites receive can vary tremendously from those that die a slow death due to lack of care to those that explode in visitor numbers due to smart marketing and so the annual estimation of the visitors a website receives may therefore be wildly innacurate by the time the renewal process rolls around.
While we therefore applaud the CO2 Neutral Website for their efforts, it does seem that GreenScroll is a far simpler and cheaper solution which is therefore likely to have a far higher uptake and as a result lead more website owners to becoming carbon neutral.
CO2 Stats
If you ever shop online you may have come across a range of “trust logos” such as the Better Business Bureau or the Which? shopper icon which can be clicked to verify that the website you are on is safe, reliable and free from viruses. Not only does this help to increase the user experience but tests have also found that numerous sites see an increase in business when their website can be independently verified as being trustworthy with your personal information.
CO2 Stats is site which aims to offer similar benefits for those online businesses and independent website owners who would like to neutralize the carbon generated by their websites. For clients of CO2 Stats a small button can be placed on your site which, when clicked, brings up independent verification of your website’s green status.
Unlike some of the competition in this niche CO2 Stats aims to offer considerably more than merely offsetting your websites carbon emmissions. For example you will have access to a website energy efficiency service to help you to reduce the overall energy use of your website as well as providing analytics to monitor the reactions of your visitors to the inclusion of your “Green Certified Site” badge.
Related Eco Friendly Articles:
- 10 Ways To Make Your Bathroom Greener
- Six Steps To Make Your Website More Eco Friendly
- 7 Ways To Make Your Office More Green
Other Eco Friendly Articles We Recommend:
- How To Unlock Your Sexual Potential (myBIGearth)
- How To Fix Your Burned Out Lawn (Big Blog Of Gardening)
loading...
