How Our Favorite Websites Are Contributing to Climate Change

If the internet were a country, it'd be the 7th most polluting. In the past 10 years alone, websites have grown 320% heavier. We studied the hidden cost of the internet's top 250 websites, comparing their carbon footprint & their yearly environmental impact. You can find the results here: https://keyprint.backspace.eco. Our analysis shows that 40% of these websites generate significantly more than the global average of 0.5g CO2 per page load — some up to a whopping 16g. Compounded by millions or billions of visitors, they unnecessarily generate about 234,342,373kg (515M pounds) of CO2 every single year. This is the same as a gas car driving around the Earth 23 million times. We'd need around 4 billion trees growing for 10 years to absorb this amount. There are plenty of ways to reduce a website's emissions. For example, if all the analyzed websites were using a green host, the overall emissions would be 76.15% lower. That's a HUGE reduction with relatively little effort. However, most companies choose profit over the planet. The carbon footprint of these websites was measured with our own service called BACKSPACE (https://backspace.eco), a website carbon analytics platform.