We're going to interrupt the doom and gloom of the news cycle and talk about an example of a company that made some sustainable content changes.
The company chose four pieces of content to measure:
1. The home page
2. A product page
3. A support page
4. The podcast
We'll look at each individually below.
TL;DR: in a pilot program using just four basic pieces of content, the company reduced their CO2-equivalent emissions by more than 7 metric tons.
The home page
The home page for this extremely large multinational company gets roughly 2,000,000 hits per year. The page, filled with stock art and a stock art animation, ran about 7 MB in page weight. There wasn't a single visual item on that page that added any value for the user, or clarity about their vast product offering.
They removed the animation, replacing it with a splash image of multiple products in action. A secondary large stock image of a person holding an electronic tablet was replaced with an image of someone using the product.
These changes reduced the page weight from 7 MB to 3 MB, a savings of 4 MB for each visit. Multiply by 2,000,000 visitors and that's 8,000,000 MB (or 8,000 GB) in avoided energy transfer.
At 0.81 kWh/GB you get 6,480 kWh of energy transfer avoided.
Plug that into the EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies calculator (which miraculously still exists), and you get 4.4 metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions avoided.
A product page
Product pages get fewer hits than the home page, which surprises me, given that searches funnel you directly to the page. Still, the page for their popular product gets 600,000 hits per year.
Unsurprisingly, given their penchant for auto-loading animations, this one also led with that. Switching nothing on the page except for converting the animation to an image reduced the page weight by 1.5 MB. That's a reduction of 900,000 MB or 900 GB.
At 0.81 kWh/GB, you get 729 kWh of energy transfer avoided.
Plug that into the EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies calculator, and you get 0.49 metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions avoided.
A support page
We chose a support page at random, with 40,000 hits. They had a single page for all product-related content, from diagrams to video walkthroughs. However, metrics showed that most people got the answer they needed from the leading text, and didn't scroll down to the imagery or videos. They removed all but one image of the product to make it clear that customers were on the correct page, and set up the remaining visuals on a page under an "additional information" link out.
This reduced the page size by 3 MB. With 40,000 hits that saved 120 GB of data transferred.
At 0.81 kWh/GB, you get 590 kWh of energy transfer avoided.
Plug that into the EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies calculator, and you get 0.4 metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions avoided.
But! You're probably thinking that this just shifted that emissions load to the "additional information" page. Actually, not really. Most people got the information that they needed from the primary support page. Only 1,200 clicked through. That page weighed 4 MB, resulting in 4.8 GB of data, or 3.9 kWh of energy transfer. That's only 0.002 metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions added back — still a significant overall win.
The podcast
The company released a podcast every other week, and it averaged an hour long for each episode. While they had a decent number of downloads (presumably auto-downloads to the individual's preferred player), they seemed surprised that actual listenership was substantially lower, and few people listened past the 30-minute mark. I saw two factors at play: 1) that's a lot of content for a B2B company, and 2) the average commute is about 30 minutes. So once they got to their destination, the listener forgot to come back to hear the end of it.
As part of a test, they reduced the podcast length by half to no more than 30 minutes. That cut their podcast impact by 0.13 metric tons for every 1000 subscribers. And look, that may not sound like much, but for those of us who are more familiar with Imperial measurements, that's 286 lbs of CO2-equivalent emissions.
What's more, their listeners were more inclined to hear the whole thing, so those emissions from downloads actually served a purpose.
The company then went on to reduce the frequency to monthly; this reduced their already-halved emissions by half again. They estimated that they cut their overall podcast impact by more than 2 metric tons of CO2-equivalent emissions.
Add it all up and it totals more than 7 metric tons. That's the equivalent of 16 barrels of oil.
Is it worth it? I certainly believe it is. These changes not only reduced emissions impact but also improved usability for their customers. Isn't that the ultimate goal?