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Cutting Digital Carbon Footprint by 30%: How Web Design Choices Can Lower CO2 Emissions
49 Plays6 months ago
Learn how your digital footprint contributes to global CO2 emissions and what steps you can take to reduce your digital carbon footprint. In this episode of the Green New Perspective podcast, we explore the often overlooked environmental impact of our online activities with Fabio Mecarone, Marketing & Sustainability Manager at Karma Metrix.
Fabio discusses how Karma Metrix helps businesses check their digital footprint, lower their CO2 footprint, and improve sustainability in the digital space. Tune in to our cleantech podcast to deepen your environmental awareness and learn more about climate tech solutions for a greener future.
📚 Resources & Links:
- Website: https://www.karmametrix.com
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- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karmametrix
🌍 Cleantech Podcast Created By New Perspective Marketing
This podcast is proudly sponsored by New Perspective Marketing, a dynamic growth marketing agency in Boston, MA, celebrating 20 years in business. We help sustainably focused B2B organizations grow their brands and scale up revenue. If you or your organization is looking to grow, visit https://www.npws.com for more info.
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Podcast Key People
- Podcast Host: Dunja Jovanovic
- Executive Producer: Marko Bodiroza
- Creator: Nathan Harris
#cleantech #sustainability #podcast
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello friends, and welcome to another episode of the Green New Prospective Podcast, your go-to place when you want to learn about innovations happening within clean tech, nature tech, biotech, and agri-tech space. In today's episodes, we are wondering how sustainable are our digital lives and businesses.
Guest Introduction: Fabio Macaroni
00:00:15
Speaker
My guest today is Fabio Macaroni, Marketing Director of Karma Metrics, a company that measures, calculates, and improves the environmental sustainability of your websites.
00:00:26
Speaker
Stay tuned and find out how much water we use by making just one prompt chat GPT. Enjoy!
Fabio's Background and Path to Digital Sustainability
00:00:40
Speaker
Hi Fabio and welcome to the Green New Perspective podcast. Hi Donja and thank you for having invited me. So can you tell me and the audience a bit more about yourself and karma metrics, what you're doing? I have been graduated in economy management.
00:00:56
Speaker
Then I started the path of working with analysis, marketing analysis, more of that. And then I came to the first company of the inventor of karmametics, which is a SEO company. So I was working on SEO.
00:01:12
Speaker
And then we stumbled with the sustainability for chance, I would say, because one of our customers asked us if what we do on the SEO part, on the automation part, may have some kind of environmental impact. We didn't know it, so we had to make some researches.
00:01:33
Speaker
And we find out that the internet has an environmental impact. And that's why our founder decided to create Carnometrics, which works in the field of the digital sustainability. And we have an algorithm that can measure the CO2 emissions caused by a website. So mainly that's what we do. We are, we say, a journey of digital sustainability that helps the companies to measure and improve their digital impact.
The Environmental Impact of Digital Activities
00:02:03
Speaker
Can you tell me more about the impact of all this digital space on the environment? Yes, usually people don't think about it because you don't see the smoke coming out from a PC unless it is on fire. Sorry for interrupting you, but when we're talking about sustainability, people are usually recommending to go paperless and to go full digital, not actually thinking about the impact of digital space and sustainability.
00:02:30
Speaker
Yes, of course. Surely the digital part is better than the flame part. So having a PDF, of course, is better than having a printed paper. But if we consider the world digital impact, if it would be a country, it would be the fourth country in the world for CO2 emissions and third country in the world for energy consumption. Why is that? Because most of the energy produced in the world still comes from the fossil fuels.
00:02:58
Speaker
the 60% of the energy worldwide produced comes from fossil fuels. And of course, when we consume energy, we have a carbon footprint too. And so that's very big. It is almost the double of the
00:03:12
Speaker
the aircraft pollution. Okay, so that's a very big impact. I made a research last year on the five big techs, the American big techs, which are Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta. Only those five companies pull together. They have the same emissions as, for example, a country like Belgium. Okay, so five companies are like our country. And there still wasn't all the impact that came from the development of the AI.
00:03:40
Speaker
So that's a huge impact and it will, of course, always grow.
Karma Metrics' Algorithm for CO2 Estimation
00:03:50
Speaker
At the moment, we only are focused on the website path because we are young. So we started with one thing, the websites, but we are developing how to measure and reduce the impact of the emails and of the smartphone's app. OK, so at the moment we have an algorithm. This algorithm makes an estimation of the carbon footprint of a website. And then we had the companies with a consultancy path
00:04:19
Speaker
to understand what on the website causes more emissions and how they can improve it. I'll make an example, choosing the color of a website may have an impact on the carbon footprint.
00:04:32
Speaker
because brighter colors like the white are more impacting, for example, than the black one. So if you make a black screen, a black website, it may pollute six times less than a white website. And then there is all the question about the CSS files, the JavaScript files. Okay, so it becomes very technical, the heavy of the
00:04:57
Speaker
the images, so there are more than 20, 30 parameters we consider in our analysis and we have the companies to make their website much more eco-friendly. We are average on a 30% reduction of emissions with our path, but we had clients that went up to 90% of the reduction. Wow. And how do you measure those impacts? We have an algorithm that it's a patented one.
00:05:25
Speaker
And it takes consideration of all these parameters. It calculates how much energy consumption they are causing. And then by considering the mixed energy, how the energy is produced, we make the estimation of the carbon footprint of the website.
Raising Awareness of Digital Carbon Footprint
00:05:42
Speaker
And how do you feel the companies should do and think beyond just the website to address the sustainability holistically, let's say? They are doing a lot of requests about it.
00:05:53
Speaker
That's why we are not only thinking about the website, but we are expanding and going to measure many other things. They are starting to ask us, for example, not only, as I already said, the emails or the web apps or the apps.
00:06:08
Speaker
They are starting to ask us if they can measure the hardware in the company or what they are using inside the company on a digital aspect. We'll think about it. We need time to develop to make the studies, but our vision is to make the world digital more sustainable and so we're trying to add the piece at a time.
00:06:28
Speaker
What are the biggest misconceptions about web sustainability or digital sustainability you encountered during this journey of yours? That people think usually that it is an endless resource. It's because it is proposed to us. If you think about having the internet connection with unlimited traffic,
00:06:51
Speaker
having those storage with a lot of gigabytes, terabytes of space for just a few euros. So people think that it's endless. It's almost endless. They don't think about the fact that the more they use it, the more the impact of it is. An example I usually like to make is with photography. A digital photo has a less impact than a printed photo.
00:07:17
Speaker
But it's the same if we make 100,000 photos, because with the classic photography, you make 110 photos when you're on vacation. Now with the smartphone, you make thousands of photos. And only the storaging of 1,000 photos is almost 50 kilos of CO2 emissions. So we have to learn to use a more accurate way, the digital.
00:07:43
Speaker
Do you feel that companies or people, you mentioned photography here, which is something that we all do, are educated enough about digital sustainability? They are not. That's why we are working a lot on awareness too.
Practical Tips for Reducing Digital Carbon Emissions
00:07:59
Speaker
So we go, for example, in the universities to make some lessons about it. We make it in the companies, internal lessons, internal education, so they can use internet, the digital path better when they work and in their private life too. For example, cleaning the photos on the files from the smartphone. Don't make three, four, five backups of the data because it's not necessary.
00:08:27
Speaker
unless you're a bank, a bit more important. So using the dark mode, that helps a lot. You can see it completely when you see how long the battery lasts. So I make another example. When we make all those working meetings, all with the camera on, you don't need the camera on for all the people. Maybe it's only for the ones that are talking.
00:08:51
Speaker
because that consumes a lot of energy. I invite you and everyone to make a test and try to see from the laptop the estimated time left of the battery when you are in a meeting and when you are not. When you are in a meeting, the estimated lifetime of the battery may be cut off in half. And with camera off?
00:09:15
Speaker
With camera off it goes a bit higher. And do clients approach to you what well interest is to lower their carbon emissions or do you go to them?
Challenges and Importance of Digital Sustainability
00:09:27
Speaker
Usually companies are very focused on lowering their carbon emissions in some different sections, not in the digital space.
00:09:34
Speaker
Yes, of course. Usually we have to find them. We have to push them because if you want to improve something, the first things you have to do is to know it. Okay. So as long as the people and the companies don't know that the internet causes emissions can't think about making something about it.
00:09:53
Speaker
So that's why we have to do a lot of awareness. We have to go searching for them. But what I see is that whenever we contact them and we explain what we are doing, there is a lot of curiosity. So everyone is saying, really? And what was the biggest surprise for you working in camera metrics on the side of your offerings? The biggest surprise were mainly two, I will say. One is when
00:10:23
Speaker
We made a project, The Journey, with one of the biggest Italian websites, which is Godetella Sport. It is a newspaper talking about sport. They did it with Fuzz, and when they have their emissions, they lowered the emissions by 3,000 tons of CO2. I would imagine a single website may have such an higher impact. That was really
00:10:49
Speaker
impressive. And I am wondering if a website has a worldwide knowledge, which is known worldwide, with a lot more traffic than a national website, how big can its impact be? So that's very, very interesting. And the other thing was when I made the research about how big is the impact of the artificial intelligence. And for example, about GPT,
00:11:16
Speaker
When I was talking about it, I found a study that said that the water footprint of training an AI like chachapiti consumes as much water as a nuclear reactor. So that's another part we are trying to introduce, not only calculating the future impact of a website, but the carbon footprint too.
00:11:40
Speaker
because all the servers of the data centers, they need to be cooled with water at the moment. And so they have a really big impact on that aspect too. Yeah, I suppose the people are not thinking about water consumption when they're doing their research via chat GPT or some other AI platform. Is that a single question made to chat GPT may consume up to half a liter of water?
00:12:06
Speaker
Well, I didn't know that. That's so interesting. And where do you see the biggest challenges in introducing website sustainability?
00:12:15
Speaker
The biggest challenge is not only to make people aware of it, but to make them understand how big can be the impact of the website. So we can talk of thousands of tons of impact. We said before, it is the first country in the world by future emissions. Imagine if a country like India or Russia cuts their emissions by 30%. It is a huge impact on the world environment.
00:12:43
Speaker
So if everyone is aware of it and makes his part on the digital side, it can have a really important impact on the environmental system. And what else is needed for digital websites sustainability to reach a tipping point? Let's say regulation, education, we mentioned already education, something else maybe aside from that?
Need for Regulation and Education
00:13:07
Speaker
Surely education, but I think
00:13:09
Speaker
that a big part must come from the regulation of course. I always think that the two parts need to go together. I make an example about the big trend of the diet. People making attention about calories of the products they buy and so on.
00:13:29
Speaker
Why they make attention to the calories? Because it's easy to know the calories of a product. You have in almost every country the obligation to put the calories on the packaging. So imagine if you have the obligation to make the carbon impact of the product on every package and the same on the website and so on.
00:13:52
Speaker
If people have the information with an easy accessibility, they start to look at them, to make a confrontation. They start to make choices about the information that they have. The more we make it needed to give information to the people, the more they can choose in a good way.
00:14:12
Speaker
What advice would you give to companies who are just starting to think about digital sustainability? Where should they begin? The first thing we always suggest is to start with demiseration.
00:14:23
Speaker
Be aware of the impact of your website, because sometimes we found websites that were already sustainable, so they didn't need to do something about it. They worked on other aspects of the website, and by chance they had a sustainable website. So that's the first part of all, how to know the impact of your website.
00:14:45
Speaker
And then we can discuss about having the whole journey in improving the impact of the website. We have the free demo of our algorithm on the website. So everyone can go there and, for example, test the homepage and have an idea of the average emissions of the website. Then, of course, it is not complete because we have to gather some information which server the companies have, for example, and so on.
00:15:13
Speaker
But it's a good start to understand more or less the impact of the website. And do you have some offerings for companies that are working remotely like ours, for example? We do have a website, but all of our business is on cloud. Yes, because even if the website is, for example, on a green cloud, the cloud isn't
00:15:34
Speaker
the path that impacts the most. The cloud may be around 5% and 15% of the emission correlated to a website, but the biggest part is from the end user device. So making your website more sustainable helps to make the end user more sustainable too. So it is important not only to think, okay, I have a data center, I have a cloud,
00:16:00
Speaker
hosted on a green cloud, which only uses renewable energy, it is not enough. Because as I said before, 60% of the energy still comes from fossil fuels. So our website needs anyway, in my opinion, to be assessed and improved in case they need it. The last question for you is, if you had, let's say, a magic wand to change something about sustainability, not just digital sustainability, but overall, what would it be and why?
00:16:29
Speaker
You think one thing that can change? Yeah, whatever you wish to change like in a day if you had a magic wand. That's a good question.
00:16:40
Speaker
getting rid of the fossil fuels may be the most important thing. All going totally on renewable energies, because it will solve a lot of problems. Not every problem, because as I said, even if you have no emissions, there are a lot of other problems, the soil, the water consumption and so on, but at least we solve one big problem.
Episode Conclusion
00:17:04
Speaker
Well, thank you Fabio. And I wish you all the best in your business to improve the digital sustainability of websites and a lot to raise awareness about the issue, which is also a very important thing that you're doing. Thank you very much. And tell us, tell me well, and our audiences where people can find you, where they can write to you and get informed more about what you're doing, get in touch with you.
00:17:32
Speaker
So they can contact us from our website, which is caramelmetrics.com, or they can write directly to me on LinkedIn. Okay. Thank you. Thank you once again. Bye.
00:17:50
Speaker
Well, this marks the end of another episode of the Green New Perspective podcast. If you're curious about innovative tech aimed at combating climate change, consider subscribing to our podcast on your favorite streaming platform. We are available everywhere from Spotify to YouTube, and we are hosting CEOs, product management, chief technology officers, marketing managers, sustainability managers from all over the world who are working in clean tech, nature tech, biotech and agri-tech space.
00:18:19
Speaker
This episode is proudly sponsored by New Perspective, a Boston-based marketing agency working with cleantech clients only. And if you're curious about how the agency can help your cleantech business to grow, click in the link in the description of this episode and find out how sustainable medical marketing can actually change the world. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did and hopefully I see you in the next one. Bye!