Digital

Carbon neutral website: the case of VW Canada

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Objectives

• reduce environmental impact of online presence
• raise awareness of websites’ carbon footprint

Green Value indicator

• reduction of ecological footprint
• CO2 savings
• Energy intensity
• This practice is green as it uses the best practices online for website creation, maintenance and evidence of multimillion visits, yet staying cleaner than 99% of pages tested on www.websitecarbon.com/

Explanation

VW Canada claims “That’s why we created this web experience: to educate Canadians about sustainability in the digital world. By reducing our electric vehicle web pages to little more than black and white text—even the images—we’ve significantly lowered the amount of data embedded in them. Meaning it now takes less energy to transfer that data over the internet, effectively lowering the digital carbon footprint of these pages. Now you can read all of our sustainability-focussed content the way it was meant to be read: in the most carbon-efficient way possible.”

Let us explore this example of low-carbon website by reducing unnecessary load. Launched in February 2021, the microsite – which showcases the brand’s electric vehicles – is the brainchild of Wholegrain Digital and TYPE 1, a team made up of people from creative agencies TAXI and Wunderman Thompson. Web pages are rendered in black and white rather than colour. Conventional images are replaced by mosaics of low-data ASCII text characters, which create the illusion of vehicle silhouettes. In the backend, coding has been streamlined to further reduce page weight. According to Allen Kwong, creative director at TYPE 1 and TAXI, browsing this website produces an average of just 0.022g of CO2 per page view versus an average of 1.76g.

However, the comparatively low carbon emission of the website should not mislead you to the assumption that VW is generally climate neutral or “green”. Huge amounts of CO2 are emitted in the production of cars and in their use (even electric cars). The automobile industry is still one of the major climate killers.

PROS/CONS of the action

Pros:

• browsing this website produces an average of just 0.022g of CO2 per page view compared to an average of 1.76g
• no lack of good aesthetics
• good effort to raise environmental awareness
• educates Canadians about sustainability in the digital world
• extremely optimized
• search engine optimized
• hosted on green SSD servers

Cons:

• no high quality images
• no colour
• eventually, to find out what you really want, you switch to the high-footprint website

Certified

Not Certified

Link to useful sources

Link to Volkswagen Canada Carbon Neutral Net www.vw.ca

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