The Role of Frontend Code in Reducing Carbon Emissions
summary
The web produces roughly 4% of global greenhouse gases, with an average page view emitting about 1.8 g CO2 and 250,000 pages published daily; cutting data transfer is the largest win. Recommendations include fewer API queries, frontend caching, replace PNG with WebP, use WOFF2 fonts, prefer WebM for video, dark themes to save display energy, and host on renewable-powered providers. An open source linter, ec0lint, already suggests many fixes during development and claims up to 88% page-size reduction in tests; more rules are in progress.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (29)
- 0:00intro
- 0:22preamble
- 0:49digital ecology...
- 1:20how does the internet emit co2?
- 2:23data transfer and power lines
- 2:39end devices
- 3:314% of all greenhouse gases
- 4:02what can we do about it?
- 5:42browsing
- 6:33devices
- 7:05websites
- 10:07sistainable web design by tom greenwood
- 10:27the formulas
- 11:28how can we create more sustainable websites?
- 11:39programming language
- 12:35libraries
- 13:22call to external apis
- 13:44images
- 14:07videos
- 14:35fonts
- 15:04colors
- 15:21hosting
- 16:04user data collection
- 16:48why?
- 17:21ec0lint
- 17:48features
- 18:05environmental impact
- 18:35scaling
- 19:19references
related talks
18mCan you mitigate the carbon footprint of websites?
22mDigital Ecology: Can you Mitigate The Carbon Footprint of Websites
49mDesigning Energy Efficient Websites
33mUX and sustainable Web
30mReducing the Carbon Footprint of your Website
38mSustainable Web Design: Principles and Best Practices
45mYour frontend is ☠️ ⚠️ Let's measure its impact with CO2 js
10mSustainable means performant