Considering the Carbon Footprint of the Online

When I first started working on Expanded, I reflected on what it might mean to actively and enthusiastically work to generate more content for BlackFlash’s website and, in turn, contribute to increasing its carbon footprint. My first editorial was determined to hold this concern in mind as I worked to develop programming for the space of the online:

My approach to this year-long project will aim to centre the digital space in ways that consider the environment of the online as one directly tied to and interwoven with the off. Afterall, as James Bridle reminds us: “The cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible, if you know where to look for it. The cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapour and radio waves, where everything just works. It is a physical infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy and reside within national and legal jurisdictions.”¹

I knew at the time (and even more so now), that not everything would be possible: it’s an incredible task to reimagine an existing website with the environment in mind. The reality of a Canadian arts publishing budget means that resources are scarce, and overhauling a website from the ground up is not easy to implement. When I weighed the importance of offering readily accessible content alongside the vast and important archives already holding space on BlackFlash Magazine’s server, transforming the existing site into one with a lower carbon-footprint raised many questions. But with the internet and its supporting systems accounting “for about 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions”² —expected to double by 2025—it’s a reality that is important to recognize and prioritize as we continue to expand our online lives.

Keeping these concerns in mind, I have incorporated some small shifts into the project. You might notice that Expanded uses a different font than the bulk of the website—it’s an attempt to lower the time and file weight required by users when accessing page content. By ensuring system fonts are incorporated into Expanded pages, readers’ computers don’t need to do any extra work to translate and read text visible on the page.³ One change to Expanded pages that (I hope!) is not as visible is the fact that images are compressed before publishing in order to decrease the file size stored on servers, as well as the amount of data needed by readers to view them. It’s a small step that offers an easy solution, given the importance of images to our field and the weight that images have when it comes to a carbon footprint. On most websites, images are the single largest contributors to page weight; it’s one area where BlackFlash’s website will always have added mass.

Some of the work to lower Expanded’s carbon footprint is even less visible. Behind the scenes, my colleague Emilie Neudorf and I have worked to increase search engine optimization as a way to enhance usability along with the time it takes to access information (thus consuming less energy)—a critical step to help lower the carbon footprint of the user experience. Similarly, Zach Ayotte’s attention to detail contributes to the project’s web efficiency: readers, ideally, waste less time on errors and obscurities when engaging with projects.

Individually, these steps might seem small, but collectively, they make a tangible difference. They are simple ways to start the conversation around the environmental impacts of the online, and they are a first step in finding ways to encourage bigger changes in the future. Still, while these small changes may have helped to lessen the impact of the additional content added to BlackFlash’s website across the year, at the end of the day, additional content means more weight.

In December 2021, along with the help of a website carbon calculator, I measured blackflash.ca’s carbon footprint: “1.25 g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits this web page, blackflash.ca produces approx: 30.08kg based on 2000 views per month. That is the equivalent of five trees.”⁴

Repeating the measurement now, in October 2022, we’re up to the equivalent of seven trees (ugh!), but the bandwidth utilized by site visitors is down on average from last year, from 122.05 GB (1481.68 KB/Visit) in 2021, to 120.20 GB (1385.26 KB/Visit) in 2022 (with 2 busy months still to come).

“The internet consumes a lot of electricity. 416.2TWh per year to be precise. To give you some perspective, that’s more than the entire United Kingdom.”⁵

While researching these issues, in both my role as Expanded’s Online Editor and as an artist who generates websites as a part of practice, I’ve often looked to the Synthetic Collective for insight. Their Plastic Heart Field Guide, released alongside their 2021 exhibition Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through, offers strategies for considering the environment as a critical step in exhibition development, including details about their experience with building a solar powered website.

A Manifesto for Curating and Making Art in a Time of Environmental Crisis:

Lead by example.

Avoid transferring responsibility: carbon offsets alone are not enough and should be understood as greenwashing.⁶

There is a lot of helpful information to be found online about building your own solar powered website. lowtechmagazine.com is especially useful, and the Synthetic Collective offer insight into their experience within the Field Guide:

In terms of archiving the exhibition, the SC was able to make use of a solar-powered server to host a low-data website (www.plasticheart.solar). Solar power means the website simply isn’t available all the time, as it literally depends on the weather. However, the SC found that interesting, and a way of physically embodying “slow curating” (you just have to wait until the sun comes out). […] The website itself, designed by Anna Eyler, meticulously analyses data size to make all design and layout decisions (e.g. one, single, static scrolling page results in lower data than many pages and navigation bars). Despite the stripped-down aesthetic, a fruitful byproduct of this low data, clean design is global accessibility: it takes much less bandwidth to view our exhibition site, making it more accessible in locations without broadband.⁷

To learn more about the process, and with the Synthetic Collective’s support, I began re-building a personal project website to move onto their solar powered server. My first step was to lower the site’s overall energy use. I began by optimizing the images (with the help of Edmonton-based designer Sergio Serrano) to ensure they weighed as little as possible while still maintaining detail. The original site itself wasn’t especially heavy, but decreasing the number of pages in favour of longer, static scrolling pages made a big impact. I incorporated system fonts and opted for a darker background colour to lower energy use on the side of users.⁸ For now, the site sits on a green server that utilizes eco-friendly solutions while also matching any energy pulled from the grid in the form of renewables.

The changes I made to the site are tangible. Measured by the website carbon calculator, it began as 87% more efficient than most websites, and after my adjustments and moving to a green server, it now sits at 98% cleaner. Once migrated onto the Synthetic Collective’s solar powered server, the site will have even less of a carbon footprint.

Solar-powered technologies catalyze a need for energy-centered design where the energetic dimension of cultural production is centered. On a solar-powered server, it is advantageous to minimize the amount of data being transmitted and it is therefore desirable to reduce the size of the media published. The intermittency of solar energy production also produces environmentally programmed downtime, where one’s server might sleep at night, or for the long evenings in the winter, demanding that you stop working and focus your attention elsewhere.⁹

Building a website in this way from scratch requires little additional labour and effort, and I found that I appreciated the structural parameters as I worked to imagine the project online. While approaching a larger publication project might require a different framing of goals, working on Expanded has illustrated to me that considering carbon footprint as an important part of online publishing is not only necessary but entirely possible. These small steps make a big difference, and I think it’s a conversation more arts organizations and creative-sector projects ought to be having. With models like those offered by the Synthetic Collective to learn from, I hope we’ll begin to see more examples as to how such tactics might be employed.

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Christina Battle is BlackFlash Expanded’s Online Editor.

1. Christina Battle, “Considering the Space of the Online,” BlackFlash Expanded, February 3, 2022.
2. The contribution to greenhouse emissions is “similar to the amount produced by the airline industry globally.” Sarah Griffiths, “Why Your Internet Habits Are Not as Clean as You Think,” BBC Future, March 5, 2020.
3. A single font file could be as much as 250kb to download, more when formatting (bold or italics, for example) are included. Tom Greenwood, “17 ways to make your website more energy efficient,” Wholegrain Digital, October 23, 2019.
4. “The average web page tested produces approximately 0.5 grams CO2 per page view. For a website with 10,000 monthly page views, that’s 60 kg CO2 per year.” Website Carbon Calculator by Wholegrain Digital.
5. Website Carbon Calculator
6. The Synthetic Collective, Plastic Heart: A DIY Fieldguide for Reducing the Environmental Impact of Art Exhibitions, points 2 and 7 (2021), 10.
7. Ibid., 33.
8. “LCD screens run most efficiently with a lighter color palette. BUT note: Dark websites were one of the first techniques popularized for saving energy on websites many years ago and it faded away with the advent of LCD screens, which unlike CRT screens had a permanent backlight, using the same energy regardless of the colour actually visible on the screen. However, with the advent of OLED screens that light up each pixel individually, using darker colours is once again a viable technique to reduce energy on end user devices.” Kris De Decker, “How to Build a Low-tech Website?” Low-tech Magazine, updated April 18, 2022.
9. “Beyond Artificial Intelligence” Solar Protocol.