The hidden ways online companies can reduce their carbon footprint

If you’re running a digital-first or fully remote business, you may think you’ve been able to reduce your environmental footprint by cutting out paper, commuting, and office lighting. But if you’re serious about making a big difference, there are still plenty of ways your activities could be building up a serious carbon footprint.

Code, server space, and little habits in the workforce can all add up to make your business’s dent on the environment much bigger than you might think. With data centres accounting for 1-1.5% of all global electricity usage today, companies that seek to seize the moment must develop a crystal clear picture of their environmental footprint, and what they can do to knock it into shape.

The good news is, many businesses’ energy wastage can be mended with a little knowledge and thoughtful choices.

Without further musing, it’s time to explore some of the hidden gems of digital waste, and the most impactful steps businesses can take to reduce their carbon footprint. As a remote business focused on sustainability and keeping our emissions to the minimum, we’ll look at some of the tools that we’ve been using, or are considering using, along the way.

Front-end website bloat

Webpages’ demand on data centres is high, and the data suggests it’s getting higher. Javascript and images account for the majority of this profligacy. As a site grows in popularity, every kilobyte transferred will multiply across pageviews and users, increasing the energy used in caches, networks, and servers.

Though the energy it takes to serve a webpage is fairly small, when this is scaled across thousands or millions of pageviews, the cost to the environment quickly becomes much more substantial.

According to digital carbon footprint calculator Website Carbon, “the average web page produces approximately 0.36 grams of CO2 per pageview”. That’s 43kg of CO2 per year for a page with 10,000 monthly views. Yuck.

Our own website is doing better than most but there’s still some way to go to attain the coveted A+ grade.

How to fix it:

• Audit webpages for transfer size, largest resources, and request counts, prioritizing pages with the highest impact (e.g. your lovely homepage).
• Convert image files to formats like WebP or AVIF.
• Lazy-load off-screen images.
• Replace heavy custom fonts with system fonts, and remove or consolidate third-party tags.
• Set and respect a page-weight target for all new content (for example <1MB for mobile).
• Exercise good Javascript discipline by avoiding large bundles sent to the client and deferring non-critical code.
• If all of that sounds like arcane technical wizardry, then use third-party tools and plugins to help streamline your website’s performance by making technical fixes more feasible. For instance, at Akepa we use WPRocket to make the magic happen.
• Consider powering your website with green hosting – but based on renewable energy not tree planting.

Idle or inefficient servers

Many organizations get into a doom loop of bad resource wastage by running servers 24/7 with a low average utilisation. Even when servers are “Idle”, they’ll still draw a significant proportion of their peak power. This makes extra instances and test machines highly wasteful, especially if you’re looking to reduce the carbon footprint for your business.

Aside from the impact on the environment, poorly-sized virtual machines and staging servers that never delete will create unnecessary costs for your business. If you multiply this over a whole fleet of servers, you’ll soon be having to contend with a serious amount of CO2 and revenue leakage.

How to fix it:

• Use sleep or deep-sleep states for dev machines that are infrequently used.
• Follow cloud provider recommendations and tools to downsize RAM and CPU wherever utilization is low.
• Take a peek at platforms like 20I’s autoscaling hosting (as we are) to better connect real computation with demand, and prevent too many servers from running during quiet hours. This dynamic adjustment can drastically reduce the power and cooling needed.
• If you decide to use autoscaling, avoid unnecessarily high floor values and minimum instances (a bit technical, but the parameters the autoscaling is based on).

Emails and digital retention

Email may save trees compared to traditional forms of marketing and communication. However, that doesn’t make them carbon-neutral.

Oh no. According to the Carbon Literacy Project, emails can emit 0.2g to 0.3g of CO2 each, depending on the device used to send and receive them.

The carbon footprint of business emails can easily be overlooked by many businesses, especially in the early stages where most communication is internal. However, as the company grows, corporate mailing lists, long-term data retention, and demanding attachments can all gang-up and amplify your business’s cost to the planet.

How to fix it:

• Purge or archive marketing lists, and reduce the send rate to inactive recipients. This will not only reduce your business’s carbon footprint, but improve engagement in your email marketing engagement metrics.
• Implement policies for sharing files via links instead of large attachments.
• Set retention rules so that company email addresses auto-archive or delete emails that are older than a certain period of time unless they’re tagged.
• Segment and personalize campaigns carefully to reduce total message volume.
• Educate teams on small behavior changes that could save email bandwidth.
• Consider email marketing providers that are more sustainable. For instance, at Akepa we’re considering shifting our email marketing from Mailchimp to Ecosend.

Forever storage and “cold data”

A major source of pollution from business activities is employees habitually storing files and data without considering what this does for the organization’s carbon footprint.

With access to cloud storage, it’s not uncommon for teams to keep high-frequency logs, multiple backup copies, and seemingly limitless storage retention “just in case”. These kinds of habits consume money and energy both for live storage tiers and for redundancy, cooling, and management.

Many cloud providers maintain designated cold and archival tiers of storage that are engineered to reduce energy consumption. Aside from taking advantage of these features, there are various practical fixes you can use to take control of your business’s storage practices, and prevent the quiet carbon leak of “cold data”.

How to fix it:

• Establish and enforce retention policies for backups, snapshots, and logs.
• Thoroughly audit the data your business is retaining, and separate what needs to be kept for compliance vs what exists for other activities.
• Use tiered storage, sorting data into usage-based categories. A simple system could be Hot (frequently accessed), Warm (occasional), Cold / deep-archive (rarely used).
• Compress and de-duplicate backup files to reduce your overall stored bytes.
• Review your replication policies and purge any unnecessary copies of data.

AI and heavy data loads

In the long term, the large-scale adoption of AI could unlock new ways to make businesses more sustainable. Right now, however, this tech has dramatically increased the impact many businesses have on the environment. There’s just no escaping the impact that mass AI adoption is having.

Organizations like the IEA have already cited the uptake of AI as a major driver in the increasing demand on data centres. Particularly data-intensive tasks, for example training a large AI model, can be especially strenuous on the grid and escalate the carbon emissions your business is responsible for.

Though the environmental impact of AI is significant, boycotting the technology completely isn’t a pragmatic option for any modern business that wants to stay competitive. Still, there are still smart choices you can use to minimise the impact of your AI usage on the planet.

How to fix it:

• Get skillful at prompting so you don’t have to repeatedly pester AI a zillion times to get the desired result.
• Try to use AI only when it will lead to a positive outcome, not out of habit or indolence.
• Experiment with smaller, task-specific AI models, instead of automatically defaulting to large general-purpose tools.
• Combine queries and processes to prevent repeated computations.
• Prioritize data centre vendors, or Gen AI providers, with strong sustainability policies and Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE).
• Run models on local devices where possible to cut down on cloud demand.
• If training AI yourself: Implement a policy of trying to fine-tune existing AI models, instead of training new ones from scratch. And avoid hoarding unnecessary data for training AI models.
• It may be tricky but if you’re tracking your company GHG emissions and seeking to address them, then consider incorporating your AI use into calculations. Balancing things out starts with understanding the weight. We’re addressing this now with our carbon accounting partner, ClimatePartner.

Becoming a greener business – with miniature wins

Online businesses turn a deeper shade of green when they rethink even the tiniest processes with energy efficiency in mind. With a few tweaks and sneaky configurations like autoscaling, image optimization, and data retention policies, you can quickly recover both costs and leaky CO2.

Like many things in life, reducing your corporate CO2 emissions is better with a spotless attention to detail.

We hope this guide has given you a good starting point you can use to build a business transformation plan that works for you. For more support feel free to get in touch to find out how our marketing services can help you take your sustainability game to the next level