Sustainable Web Design (??)

So, for a second, think about those days in the automotive industry of 1960s, when the oil prices were low while cars were an oil hog. And nobody was wondering to ask about CO2 emissions of a vehicle to a car dealer. Now that, climate change is on the news and green products are all the engineers and designers working on, it is ok to seek for the car with the highest mpg. That’s how we are becoming more aware of the sustainable design, and learning to be more sustainable as individuals.

Now, for yet another second, think about a concept I would call Sustainable Web Design.

Can we make websites that are more sustainable?

This question might not light any bulbs in our minds for now, as an automotive maker in 1960s would look at you blank if you were to ask about CO2 emissions. But let’s think about these numbers:

Computers today are using around 70 watts of electricity. Use that for an hour, that is 0.07 kwh for your electric bill. Use it just for a second, that is 0.00001944 kwh on your bill. Well, that is the smallest number you will see for the rest of this post.

The average cost of residential electricity was 12¢/kWh (DOE) in the US in April 2009, and let’s assume this is true for the rest of the world (although it is much more expensive). So, that one second will cost you 0.000233 cents. Still looks small. Probably you already figured you wouldn’t make much difference in your bill if your computer turns off one second faster everyday.

Google.com has a very simple design, and doesn't use any extra elements that would result with more loading time.

Bing.com is using background images to create a better looking search page.

Now, let’s change some perspective, and look at these numbers from the perspective of web designers. According to Wolframalpha, Google has a daily page views of 6.8 billion. If Google was a image-heavy website, like its fresh-blood competitor Bing.com, and the loading time would take one second more for all these people visiting the site, it would result

6.8 billion * 0.00001944 kwh = 132′222 kwh per day,

not spent waiting for a background image to load. An average 1 megawatt wind turbine produces 24000 kwh a day. So, 5-6 wind turbines in the world would be working just to meet the need for that very second of loading a background image.

A farm of 5-6 turbines would be working just for that Google background image!

To make more sense of that number, we can say it is making 550′925 miles a day with a 240 watt hour/mile electric car. And if you realized, I tried to keep the numbers on the minimal side: I only included the electricity used by the computers for that second, not any of the modems, routers, ISP servers and Google’s massive servers that would carry all that background image to your computer screen. Then, maybe we should thank to Google for not heaving great but unnecessary examples of scene photography as its background image. But how about bing.com and the rest?

Here, we are possible in the early stages of a new “designing green” paradigm. Being sustainable as an individual through recycling and using less electricity etc. are efforts that we put knowing that we are making a difference. However, as in the example above, there things out of our control and we wouldn’t even worry since our individual input to such waste is very very minimal, probably way smaller than the waste of an un-recycled batteries. But with the introduction of internet to the individuals of the world, as web designers, our designs on the web start reaching to millions of uses a day, hence the massive access oto our products require a new thinking about designing sustainable. And especially, designing sustainable is becoming an issue to the web industry that newer had to deal with such an issue before. More pageviews our websites get, more the responsibility we should have for thinking the potential waste our designs would produce.

So do you think we’ll see a day that most websites would have “Green Website” badge, and users would prefer to use site A instead of site B, just because it is a ‘green’ site. Will a Firefox plugin alert us before opening up a page:

“The website you are currently trying to view doesn’t meet the Kyoto 2.0 protocols. [Continue] [Get me out of here!]“

Then until Google puts a background image to its website, enjoy your 550′925 miles a day with your Electric Car.