Sustainable Business Is Digital Business: How to Make Your Website Climate Neutral [5 Reading Tips]

Sustainable Business Reading Tips — Source: Pexels/Teona Swift

Products made from sustainable materials, fair supply chains and environmentally friendly shipping processes are crucial factors for customers when making purchasing decisions. What started as a selling point is now firmly anchored in the corporate philosophy of many companies and is increasingly being taken for granted.

Even small changes in everyday business can save resources and reduce emissions. From waste separation and climate-neutral shipping to investing in climate protection projects – there are many different measures.

Since it is mainly our daily data transfer that consumes vast amounts of electricity, offsetting the CO2 emissions of one’s own corporate website is an essential step in the right direction.

Sustainable Business Is Digital Business: Data Transfer Eats up Electricity

The servers responsible for hosting websites run 24/7 and consume a large amount of electricity in the process. Today, data transfer is among the top ten CO2 polluters worldwide. To be more precise: The carbon footprint of internet use in one year can even be compared to that of air travel. Sustainable UX designers have made it their mission to design websites in such a way that the environmental impact of calling up a page is as low as possible. Nevertheless, it cannot be avoided that every click on websites causes CO2 emissions.

So what should companies do if they cannot afford to not have a website?

Sustainable Business with Climate-Neutral Websites: This Is How It Works

By becoming a certified climate-neutral website, you can offset the carbon footprint of your website. Various certification providers such as ClimatePartner and natureOffice enable your company to invest in climate-positive and social projects. This way, activities are funded that absorb greenhouse gases, thus offsetting your company’s CO2 emissions.

Based on the energy consumption of a user’s device, the data transfer itself and the data centre hosting, the carbon footprint of your website is analysed. Taking these calculated CO2 emissions into account, it is ensured that the carbon footprint is offset by a climate protection project.

Sustainable Business: We Are Part of It, Too

Many companies already have climate-neutral websites – and we are proud to announce that dotSource has been certified by ClimatePartner as well. We support the »Wasserkraft Virunga« project, which uses a run-of-river hydroelectric power plant to generate sustainable energy that gives around four million people access to electricity.