4 minute read
Curbing the Carbon Elephant
Ian Linassi is the founder and creative director of Linassi+Co. Established in 2008. Linassi+Co is a full-service branding and digital agency working globally across luxury travel, hospitality, residential and marine sectors.
Ian Linassi, who joined us in Montenegro, urges us not to overlook the impact of our websites.
If you’re reading this publication, you’re highly likely to be en route to eco-nirvana. It’s reasonable to assume your business strives to minimise its environmental impact. You may even have commendable credentials such as B-Corp status and for all that we salute you. But for all the collective efforts in our industry, there’s still an ecoelephant lurking in the corner of the room that’s currently producing a whopping carbon footprint far surpassing that of air travel – and it’s growing exponentially.
SO, WHAT IS THIS METAPHORICAL MONSTER?
The internet is the pre-eminent touchpoint for most brands, and no business can compete, let alone survive, without it. But, according to a report published in Business Insider in February 2023, the internet currently contributes to nearly 4% of global emissions – double that of the aviation sector. In simple but terrifying terms, if the internet were a country, it would be the fifth-largest emitter of CO2 – right between Russia and Japan.
On a micro level, every single page viewed on your website uses a tiny but cumulative amount of energy. According to reset.org, an online resource that reports on and promotes tech solutions to the climate crisis, the average website produces 4.61 grams of CO2 for every page view. For websites enjoying an average of 10,000 page views per month, that bulks up to a hefty 553 kilograms of CO2 per year, which is only a few kilograms short of a one-way flight from London to New York.
WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT THIS?
At Linassi+Co, a UK-based branding and digital agency operating globally in the luxury travel, hospitality, real estate and marine sectors, we’re always on the lookout for smart ways to be more environmentally efficient while helping our clients do the same. As part of this process, we recently developed an energy-efficient approach to web builds – one that resulted in our own website, linassi. co, running up to 150 times more efficiently and nearly 20 times faster than 90% of websites.
HOW DID WE DO IT – AND HOW CAN YOU DO IT?
The ways in which a website is built can affect the amount of power required to view it. Off-the-shelf web solutions come packed to the virtual rafters with code to manage a wide variety of content requirements. Having a clear idea of the content you want to display means the developer can remove any superfluous dead code at the build stage. Further efficiencies can also be made by removing unused fonts and working with modern file formats, such as WebP, as an alternative to traditional image formats, such as JPEGs, PNGs and GIFs. In addition, being selective with the types of content hosted within a page, and optimising the content you feature, will help save power – for example, reducing the use of auto-playing videos, image sliders and interactive maps. Our new approach to development delivers websites that run with considerably greater efficiency, which subsequently results in significantly faster loading times.
DOING WELL, BUT CAN WE DO BETTER
Put simply, yes. We went one step further with linassi.co by implementing an additional efficiency mode, which allows users the option to optimise further the content they see on the page. When applied, efficiency mode replaces videos and slider functionality with preallocated small image files (we used black and white imagery to emphasise the difference, but you can stick with colour). If you visit our website, click on the lightning flash at the top right corner to switch between modes.
A LITTLE SOMETHING BEATS A LOT OF NOTHING
No, we’re not going to end the climate crisis overnight by making a few tweaks to our websites, but being mindful of things we can control and change, can only have a positive effect on the wider effort.
