5 tonnes of carbon per month

New friends at Beleaf, a sustainable web development agency in Melbourne, dropped an article this week around the emissions that data and websites can generate.

It's an eye opener.

I've been moderately aware that websites generate emissions for several years, which is why we moved to green hosting and adopted all we could of the low impact web development approach. But I had no idea it could get to this level.

The example they use in the article is the Mastercard Australia website, which has an autoplay video right at the top. Directly from the article:

"For example, if you visit Mastercard Australia, you need to transfer 11.3 Megabytes of data which will produce 2.57 grams of CO₂. You might be thinking this sounds small, but with an average of 2 million monthly users, that’s over 5 tonnes of CO₂ emitted per month, just from this one website."

(I'll skip the link to Mastercard to save a few grams of carbon, but obviously you can find it.)

If you do, the first thing you'll see is a hazy full-screen video of splashing waves and people opening curtains in slow motion, essentially a branding piece that adds nothing useful aside from maybe a bit of feeling.

Nice video, but if you're Mastercard and you became aware that your fluffy video was basically the air equivalent of dumping a few trucks worth of oil into the sea every month... would you just hit delete and trust your 2million visitors would probably still visit?

Perfect example of why design isn't always just about making things pretty. There are reasons to include or exclude design elements, and they're worth challenging your creative agency.