Carbon footprint of digital products

Imagine a chain that starts with the creation of a digital product and ends with you using it on your device. This chain involves a lot of steps that use energy.

Firstly, the creation or development of the product is done by people on computers. Even a small efficient laptop has to be charged. Many of those people need to use more than one device to test and evaluate how their product looks like in different environments.

Let's not forget testers, managers and clients, all of them are using resources to check the products developers and designers create.

Of course. Whenever you see the website or e-mail, it's not only your device working, it's often also many different servers.

Imagine a scenario, where you want to open a website. What happens?

You type a web address, which uses your device's screen and processor to work and spend energy.

After you submit the web address, the signal goes through many different servers and cables, facilities and lines to reach the destination, where the website is saved. All of those that receive and transmit the signal need to do their part and use electricity.

The final server receives this signal and processes it. Websites today are almost all dynamic, meaning a code has to run on the server, and only after it is done, the website is send back to your device the same route.

Your device now displays website on the screen, but also working, processing, doing stuff. Like animating the cute emoticon or playing video.

All that is done for every web page, every image, multiple times for a single web page load.

There are several factors that contribute to higher energy spending.

Cloud solutions, such as websites, apps, and others, use servers in data centers. Outdated servers are usually more power-hungry and inefficient. More modern processors and other chips use less energy and perform better.

While upgrading, companies shouldn't just throw away the old servers as e-waste. They can be sold or given, for example, to IT students to learn or for small home server projects.

Written code should be efficient, fast, optimized. If it's not done correctly, it runs slower and uses more time and energy to process. Plus users don't want and shouldn't wait for badly optimized code to be processed if they want to see the website.

We do several things to limit our impact.

Have you noticed our Grace products are usually dark? That's not only because dark backgrounds require less brightness on computer and mobile screens. It helps conserve battery, using 32% less energy compared to white backgrounds.

Programmers work hard to optimize the workload of websites and apps and keep searching for unconventional ways to reduce processors usage and gain performance.

We choose modern and highly efficient servers to host and run our websites and apps.

As is always said, everybody can do something for the environment.

You can reduce the brightness of your screen, limit the time spent on energy-intensive apps, and use energy-saving settings on your device.

But also small things. Rather share link to a document instead sending it through e-mail. Literally, every BIT helps!