Can we make websites that are more sustainable?
Computers today are using around 70 watts of electricity. Use that for an hour, that is 0.07 kwh for your electric bill. Use it just for a second, that is 0.00001944 kwh on your bill. Well, that is the smallest number you will see for the rest of this post.
- Now, let’s change some perspective, and look at these numbers from the perspective of web designers. According to Wolframalpha, Google has a daily page views of 6.8 billion. If Google was a image-heavy website, like its fresh-blood competitor Bing.com, and the loading time would take one second more for all these people visiting the site, it would result in:
not spent waiting for a background image to load. An average 1 megawatt wind turbine produces 24000 kwh a day. So, 5-6 wind turbines in the world would be working just to meet the need for that very second of loading a background image. A farm of 5-6 turbines would be working just for that Google background image!
Here, we are possible in the early stages of a new “designing green” paradigm. Being sustainable as an individual through recycling and using less electricity etc. are efforts that we put knowing that we are making a difference. However, as in the example above, there things out of our control and we wouldn’t even worry since our individual input to such waste is very very minimal, probably way smaller than the waste of an un-recycled batteries. But with the introduction of internet to the individuals of the world, as web designers, our designs on the web start reaching to millions of uses a day, hence the massive access oto our products require a new thinking about designing sustainable. And especially, designing sustainable is becoming an issue to the web industry that newer had to deal with such an issue before. More pageviews our websites get, more the responsibility we should have for thinking the potential waste our designs would produce.
This is an article that demonstrates how seemingly small measurements of energy can add up over time.