Sustainable Web Design: Celebrating Earth Day With Reduced Energy

Recent studies have found that digital media is not necessarily "green media." You may have heard the news reports that spam is to blame for emitting 17 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere annually or that a Google search, on average, is equivalent to driving 2 miles. As the saying goes, we may not be cutting down trees, but we are certainly inconveniencing a large number of electrons by communicating online. How? Well, the internet runs on electricity, and not always the most renewable energy sources.

Think about it for a second. Your computer and mobile devices consume energy; the server holding any files you are requesting online consumes energy; transferring those files between the server and you consumes energy. What does this mean for web developers? If we want to be environmentally conscious, we need to be concerned about the energy consumption used to view the online content we are creating.

Pacific University's homepage is viewed for approximately one thousand hours each day. During that time, thousands of scripts run on our servers and a significant amount of data is sent out all over the world. Today, we are choosing to publicly acknowledge and compensate for some of the energy that we use regularly in order to deliver that data.

The energy consumption of your website can be limited in a number of ways.
The first is to simply provide smaller, less complex files. In order to view today's version of our homepage, you are only receiving approximately 30 kilobytes of data in comparison to the usual 300 kB. We have done this by decreasing the resolution and size of any images and by eliminating any unnecessary code from our files. Our servers are not having to work as hard to send data to you, and your computer is not having to work as hard to access it.

Another concern for web designers when examining the amount of energy required to make your site available to users is color. Monitors require energy to display a website, CRT monitors in particular. While a good number of web users are now accessing your data through an LCD screen (LCD screens require approximately the same amount of energy to display any color combination), some of Pacific's visitors are still viewing our files on a CRT screen. The US Department of Energy has set ratings for the average amount of energy required for a CRT monitor to display a solid color:

White - 74 Watts	Fuchsia - 69 Watts	Yellow - 69 Watts	Aqua - 68Watts
Silver - 67 Watts	Blue - 65 Watts	Red - 65 Watts	Lime - 63 Watts
Gray - 62 Watts	Olive - 61 Watts	Purple - 61 Watts	Teal - 61 Watts
Green - 60Watts	Maroon - 60 Watts	Navy - 60 Watts	Black - 59 Watts

Therefore, at 1000 hours of viewing per day, the difference that color choice can make in energy output can end up being as drastic, approximately the same difference as switching about 1/4 of your standard light bulbs to compact florescent bulbs. Although we regularly use fairly energy efficient colors on our website, today we have consciously chosen to use colors that are darker in order to ensure that the people viewing our site on CRT monitors are not consuming as much energy in order to do so.

Although internet energy consumption is a topic that is rarely addressed when discussing green living, we at Pacific University believe it is important to realize that providing information online is not necessarily a simple alternative to printing. Just as we need to be careful about what we print and how we print, we also need to be conscious of how we provide our messages online.