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.

Pacific Students Start Community Dialogue on Sustainability

This month saw six Pacific students (myself included) organized the Washington County Sustainability Summit at Pacific University - a two-day event that engaged locally elected officials and community organizers in a dialogue about environmental issues with Pacific students and Washington County residents. Topics covered at during the Summit included everything from preparing our region for peak oil and higher energy prices, to environmental and social justice issues connected with the Palomar Liquefied Natural Gas Pipeline proposed to cut through Forest Grove.

Pacific's own Professor Terry O'Day and Miguel Cervantes, coordinator for the B St Farm Permaculture Project, spoke about the role permaculture can play in making our communities more sustainable. A panel of local government officials representing the Washington County Board, Metro, and the cities of Forest Grove, Beaverton, and Hillsboro explained what local governments are doing in our area to save energy, and what still remains to be done. Community organizers such as Peter Lunsford of Washington County Peak Oil and Olivia Schmidt of Columbia Riverkeeper urged listeners to get involved in sustainability initiatives that have the potential to transform our local area. These were just a few of the knowledgeable and inspirational speakers who came to Pacific to participate in the Summit.

To me, though, the true test of the Sustainability Summit's success will be in how it triggers future involvement in projects with the potential to make change - on the Pacific campus and beyond. I'm happy to report that so far I personally have seen Pacific students getting delve into the issue of Liquefied Natural Gas development and attend a community meeting on peak oil as a direct result of activities at the Summit. The event also helped consolidate a new student group, the Pacific University Cascade Climate Network, which will continue to build on the foundation laid by the Sustainability Summit by involving Pacific students in the most important environmental issues facing our local community.

The message of the Sustainability Summit seemed to be that our area is well positioned to become a leader in green initiatives. Washington County's plentiful farmland and proximity to the new clean energy in Oregon means the community perfectly placed to invest in locally grown food and renewable energy projects. Meanwhile our very own Pacific University, as the only major institute of higher in the county, has a unique opportunity to move the regional sustainability movement forward. It is my hope that this month's Sustainability Summit is a harbinger of things to come: of a future in which Pacific University is seen as a vital player in building a new and greener future for our region. Let the story continue!


Special thanks to Pacific students Olivia Round, Brenda Mbaabu, Guthrie Straw, Mikaila Way, and Jordan Nakayama for helping make the Sustainabiliy Summit happen, and to Professors Deke Gundersen and Terry O'Day for their support. For further updates on initiatives inspired by the Summit, please visit http://sustainwacounty.blogspot.com/

Welcome!

This blog exists as a forum to foster collaborative, fluid dialogue around the topic of sustainability. The authors are experts and shapers of Pacific's sustainable practices. They look forward to sharing thoughts and anecdotes that we hope will spark further inquiry into this important subject. We invite you to respond and play an active role in this conversation.

Disclaimer:
The opinions on this site are not intended to represent the views of Pacific University as a whole. They are instead meant to spark civil discourse and active academic inquiry into sustainable issues. We offer this forum as a place where we can offer up insight, inspiration and ideas and as a place where we can move toward creative solutions as a community.