Did you know the Internet consumes a lot of electricity? To be precise,416.2 TWh per year

To put that into perspective, that’s more than the energy consumption of the entire United Kingdom. Yikes!

 *The stat for data centers comes from this article in Nature

From data centres and transmission networks to the billions of connected devices we hold in our hands, it all consumes electricity and, in turn, produces carbon emissions equal to or greater than the world’s aviation industry.

That’s why we’re excited to announce the first phase of decarbonising our website, with updates to the following pages.

How we to reduce the data transfer? Below some examples.

Greening the web

We introduce eco-mode

Dark mode saves energy on OLED screens where each pixel works as a tiny lightbulb that can be dimmed if using darker colours or switched off when using black colour. Dark more can save approximately 42% of screen energy.

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We reduced the size of images and videos

Research shows that most images are completely ignored but they add significant weight to the website. We avoid them as much as we can, replacing them with illustrations.

 

 

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We subset fonts across our website

We subset our font. We included only characters that we use in our languages.

Subsetting fonts removes characters that are not regularly used in the languages that we use on our website. We removed these unnecessary characters from the languages that we use on our website (English and Italian), therefore we managed to reduce the font files.

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We switched to a green host

In this way, we save carbon emissions because green hosts are using renewable energy.

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Reducing our carbon footprint

The new homepage is 97% cleaner than the old homepage

The carbon footprint of our homepage alone has reduced from 7.94g of CO2 (old website) to 0.20g of CO2 in our new eco-mode feature.