Your Online Carbon Footprint: as polluting as it gets

The presentation by Jan van Dam and Robey de Jong from Roots Digital was perhaps the most eye-opening at our Meetup. Did you know that using the internet, ChatGPT, and AI often pollutes more than a car trip, a flight, or eating meat? That’s quite confronting for a company that builds websites.

Fortunately, their presentation also had a positive note: it’s entirely possible to keep using the internet while keeping your digital CO₂ emissions under control.

Robey and Jan shared tips on how to reduce our online ecological footprint, both personally and at a company level. On a personal level, you can adopt sustainable internet practices like deleting photos from your phone, closing unused tabs, and including links in your emails instead of attaching documents. As an organization, you can implement a dark mode on your website (which we can handle for you) or choose green hosting providers, such as Leafcloud.

Watch the presentation here: