We have been thinking for a while on how we can make C-Heads and the internet more sustainable. First of all, we are so thankful that we get so many mails, requests, submissions from all over the world! However sometimes we receive wetransfer links containing 1 GB for a single submission. When we download such a file in order to check it out and then delete it, all this energy which is needed for downloading this huge file was for nothing. As C-Heads has been growing a lot over the past years, the amount of submissions we receive has grown too and we have now reached the point where we would like to change a few things in order to simplify and make a good contribution to the world.
By 2025, it’s estimated that global communication technologies will be responsible for more carbon emissions than any other country except China, India and the USA. Or in other words: ‘Tsunami of data’ could consume one fifth of global electricity by 2025.
The energy consumption of the Internet is enormous, and it’s growing rapidly. Every search you put into Google, every mail send, every Netflix show watched, every Spotify song listened to, triggers servers somewhere to process and output data and then more servers to transmit it, consequently consuming electricity and burning fossil fuels. (a lot of electricity is consumed by just cooling the servers). It is responsible for approximately a billion tons of CO₂ emissions per year, with coal representing the largest share of the energy mix for many of the world’s data centres.
While also the design of a website makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment we also call everyone who is getting in touch with us to re-think and follow the following steps to avoid and reduce the amounts of data.
- Please do not send any big data! For web editorials a file size with around 1200 px wide and not larger then 1,5 MB is enough and absolutely fine. We do no accept huge files anymore.
- Please do not send attachments via mail and only use an extern service (dropbox, wetransfer, etc…)
- Please do not share a set which contains more then 40 images to select from.
- Please do no send us newsletters we never signed up.
- Do not insert any images into the mail, also try to clear e-mail history when it´s too long
- Please do not forward us the same e-mail over and over again with a call to check it out (f.e. music agencies) We will reply to your first one, in case it is a positive answer.
There are additional actions we all can take as users that will also help reduce those emissions such as dropping the quality when video streaming as this is responsible for the biggest volumes of data sent over the internet. Instead of watching something in HD go for the SD version which will drastically reduce the data streamed. Video-related traffic is already highly significant and “all forms of IP video… will continue to be in the range of 80–90% of total IP traffic”. This is dominated by Internet video such as the streaming services delivered over the Internet, but also includes the corporate IP (Internet Protocol) networks that manage and distribute video content, videos on websites, live streaming of video, file sharing, gaming, and video surveillance.
We are still working on adding more points and also improving the website becoming more environmentally friendly. Thanks for contributing!
