Are you wondering how to be environmentally friendly as a business? We all need to do our best to tackle climate change, deforestation, and pollution at home, at work, and in our daily lives. We want to inspire businesses to take steps towards being more environmentally friendly so that we can preserve our planet for future generations. Below is couple of topics to highlight in reducing your business digital impact and making it more eco-friendly.
WEBSITE BUILD
It may be a surprise to learn that how your business’s website is built can greatly impact your environmental footprint. Every time a user makes an action on your website, a request is sent to the server to action this request which uses energy. The more complex your website is and the more weight it carries, even down to hidden backend coding, the bigger this request will need to be, and therefore the more energy is required. Reducing your website weight and the number of calls to the server makes your website more eco-friendly.
It’s not just the size of the server requests to consider – there are also design factors. Darker colour pixels (depending on the monitor) usually require less energy to illuminate than lighter ones, with black being the lowest energy colour and white being the most energy intensive. This means websites with darker colour schemes can be better for the environment.
Black Ires prides itself on building eco-friendly websites; we offer custom low-carbon builds for businesses prioritising green credentials. This is a great solution if you are interested in reducing the digital carbon footprint of your website.
GREEN HOSTING
The content for your business website is hosted on a server; these servers use a lot of energy to run and keep cool. The amount of files you have stored on the server, as well as the amount of data requests your website makes to the server as a user navigates your site, the more energy your website is using.
Having your website hosted on a server that is powered using green energy can hugely reduce your websites impact on climate change. A web developer can also carry out regular website clean-ups to reduce the amount of files, code and plugins you have stored on the server, making your website even more eco-friendly.
Here at Black Ires, we offer eco-hosting as standard. Black Ires’s servers securely host hundreds of websites to reduce our client’s carbon footprint by using 100% renewable energy. We also plant hundreds of trees per year to reduce to help offset device energy usage. With guaranteed faster speeds than your current hosting, changing to Black Ires’s green hosting is the quickest win and make your online presence more eco-friendly.
DIGITAL DEVICES
The digital devices you use have a large impact on energy usage. Consider reviewing the devices that you use in your office – from laptops to monitors, TV screens and mobiles – could you pick more eco-friendly choices? While it would do more harm than good to simply go out and buy all new ones (due to the waste you would create from the old ones) – if a computer breaks or needs an upgrade, firstly see if it can be fixed, recycled or sold, then when you are ready to replace it ensure you do your research on the best environmental choice. You could even look into buying second-hand equipment – not only is this better for the environment as it reduces waste, but it can also be a great way to save some money too!
ACTIVATE POWER MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
Activate the power management system on all your computers. This system will put a PC or laptop into reduced-power mode after a period of inactivity, and you can simply touch a key to wake it up again.
SHUT DOWN TECH AT NIGHT
Shut down computers and other appliances at the end of the working day. Although this might not massively reduce energy use, it can’t hurt – so if you’re not using it, turn it off and don’t leave your laptop on charge! In fact, companies who practise energy management (lighting, electronics, and other measures) save around 15% on energy bills per year! This shows that all the little things really do add up.
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