Take Action

Many of you may not make or contribute to websites. You can still do things that impact your digital energy usage.

• Avoid sites that make your computer’s fan run or that quickly drain your phone battery. These are signs that the websites are inefficient.
• Consider using “dark mode” on your phone or computer. It takes some getting used to but this results in energy savings on OLED screens.
• Download data over wifi when possible. Wifi downloads use roughly two times less energy than cellular downloads.
• Turn off unnecessary cloud storage.
• Avoid streaming video if you aren’t watching it.

If you make websites or contribute to them, there are a number of ways you can improve the energy efficiency of sites.

• Evaluate your image use. Do you really need that picture? Is it optimized for your particular use?
• Make reflections on data size part of your authoring process and review your site efficiency regularly.
• Keep things as simple as possible. While new technologies are tempting, keeping things simple and streamlined has all kinds of benefits.

Keep Reading

• The Website Obesity Crisis by Maciej Cegłowski (Middlebury, 1997 – Russian/Studio Art)
• Why your internet habits are not as clean as you think by Sarah Griffiths
• How to build a low-tech website? by Kris De Decker
• Page Weight by Tammy Everts and Katie Hempenius
• Exploring digital ecosystems in a world stabilized at +2°C (French version) by Gauthier Roussilhe
• Really interested? This list of envirotech-related articles will continue to expand.