We spend a lot of our time browsing the web, but have we thought of the carbon emissions involved in getting a web page to be shown on our screen?
There's a long chain involved. The web page has to be stored on a server, potentially processed for consumption, sent out across the network, being passed through multiple devices on its path to you, before finally being processed by your own device so as to look just right for you to read it.
Fortunately, much of the work involved in calculating the environmental impact of the web has been done for you. Sites such as Website Carbon and Ecograder can estimate the carbon emissions due to viewing a web page. This takes a range of factors into account, from storage and processing of the page, transmitting it across the network, but also whether the server is powered by electricity from renewables or fossil fuels.
Overall, the carbon footprint of the web is huge. On average, every web page viewed generates approximately 0.8 grams of CO2. Think about how much web browsing you do, multiply that by the billions of people using the web, and the numbers are staggering - larger than the global aviation industry.
One of the problems is the sheer size of a modern web page. According to the HTTP Archive the current average amount of data needed to be downloaded for the average web page is around 2.5MB. For context, while that isn't quite as large as the collected works of William Shakespeare, it's an order of magnitude larger than the text of his individual plays.
Most of the information downloaded is sheer waste. Web pages often contain a lot of duplication and comments, JavaScript is heavily used (often for no good reason), and there may be multiple large images. And while the amount of data downloaded for a web page has been steadily and inexorably on the rise, the actual information content hardly changes.
Websites really are having an obesity crisis.
Not only does this bloat drive up carbon emissions, it also makes the browsing experience worse. First, you have to wait while all the excess data is downloaded (which is even worse for those on slow broadband or using mobile data), then you have to wait while your device processes all the data in order to show it to you. The ever increasing bloat and complexity of web pages also rapidly makes older devices obsolete, driving frequent replacements and generating e-waste.
If you're a website owner or author, there are many resources available to put your website on a diet. Not only does this reduce your carbon footprint and costs, it also makes for quicker sites and happier customers.
If you're a user, then while you can't directly change the sites you visit, you can install an Ad Blocker which will dramatically reduce the amount of data downloaded, and make browsing the web a far more pleasant experience.
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