This commitment is part of an approach that we feel is necessary in view of the evolving climate challenges we are currently facing, and which is in line with the actions taken by asset management players in their SRI and ESG approach. And because respect for the environment is everyone’s business, and website operations now account for a significant proportion of global energy consumption.

Digital pollution in figures

– If the Internet were a country, it would be the world’s 3rd largest consumer of electricity after China and the USA;
– 7 to 10% of the world’s electricity is consumed by the Internet alone;
– Watching an hour’s video on a tablet or smartphone consumes more electricity than a refrigerator for an entire year;
– A simple Google search alone could heat a cup of tea;
– According to the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (Agence de l’environnement et de la maîtrise de l’énergie), sending emails in a company of 100 people represents 13.6 tonnes of CO2 every year;
– The annual global carbon footprint of spam is equivalent to 3 million cars on the road every year. This releases 17 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, or 0.2% of global emissions (source: ICF).

What is the carbon footprint of a website?

By way of example, the carbon footprint of our agency’s website for one year corresponds to :

– 138.4 kg of CO2 equivalent: that’s as much CO2 as it takes to heat a kettle for 18,754 cups of tea;
– 322kWh of energy: equivalent to the electricity needed to drive an electric car 2,058 km;
– 7 trees: the number of trees needed to absorb the amount of carbon our site will produce over one year;

These are figures that we can no longer ignore, which is why we have decided that our next projects will pay even greater attention to optimizing the resources consumed by the sites we produce.

So we’ll be all the more vigilant about :

– Optimizing the weight of visuals and videos used
– Code optimization and number of queries used
– Caching of site resources
– Enhanced support in the choice and operation of chosen hosting solutions

We’ll also make sure that all this doesn’t come at the expense of the quality we attach to each project, and the ease of use for web users.

For this reason, we will offset the production costs of each site we create by making a donation to the Treedom platform. Treedom which creates sustainable ecosystems and supports farmers around the world in planting trees, while guaranteeing them food independence and income opportunities.

We have already taken this step: for 2020, we have already begun to finance 7 tonnes of C02 to offset our activity and the consumption of our customers’ sites.

In this way, each new site created by our agency will be optimized to minimize the resources required for its operation, and at the same time will be accompanied by the planting of trees around the world.

The SAND agency team