The internet consumes a lot of electricity. 416.2 TWh per year.
How are universities and colleges impacting the planet? You may not think of websites as sources of carbon emissions but they are. Data centres, transmission networks, and the devices we use to access them all use electricity which, in turn, produces carbon emissions. When your website has lots of visitors that can easily add up. We've used the Website Carbon Calculator (created by Wholegrain Digital) to assess UK learning provider homepages.
The average emissions from a UK learning provider homepage are 2.96g (median of 1.91g) which is worse than an average website (1.76g). So, overall, UK learning providers are doing badly. The top and bottom 10 websites are given here with the full list below.
| UK learning provider | CO2 / grams |
|---|---|
| Sheffield Hallam University | 0.14 |
| University of Wales Prifysgol Cymru | 0.34 |
| University of Surrey | 0.40 |
| The University of Westminster | 0.41 |
| The University of Manchester | 0.48 |
| University of the West of England, Bristol | 0.49 |
| Birkbeck College | 0.51 |
| University of Lancaster | 0.51 |
| University of Portsmouth | 0.52 |
| Plymouth Marjon University | 0.54 |
| UK learning provider | CO2 / grams |
|---|---|
| The University of Cumbria | 17.89 |
| Royal Conservatoire of Scotland | 16.60 |
| University of Winchester | 12.79 |
| Leeds College of Music | 11.38 |
| University of Nottingham | 10.62 |
| University College London | 10.09 |
| The City University | 9.47 |
| Royal College of Music | 9.39 |
| The Conservatoire for Dance and Drama | 9.32 |
| University of the West of Scotland | 9.17 |
Each visitor may only produce a few grams of CO2 emissions but when taken over time - and over the number of visitors - that can soon add up. For instance, if your page generates 1g of CO2 per visit and you get 10,000 visitors a month that works out at as much CO2 as boiling water for 5,700 cups of tea a year.
Aside from the environmental impact of large websites, there is also the impact on your visitors who are on limited data plans. A single visit to a 30MB homepage (12g of CO2) would use an entire day's worth of data for someone on a 1GB monthly plan.
Don't despair! The worst offenders usually have some very easy things they can do to dramatically reduce their CO2 emissions that most likely don't need the IT department to get involved. The first thing to do is check the file sizes of images you use on the front page. Often there will be a large header image, images in a carousel, or images associated with news items. These are most likely added through a content management system which doesn't optimise the image.
Check out our advice for local authorities, Wholegrain Digital's 17 ways you can make your website more efficient and our blog post from the #PlanetData2 event in 2020.
Here is the full list of universities with their CO2 emissions but you can also get this as a CSV file or TSV file. Note that university websites often change with new featured items and this can affect their CO2 emissions so this table is a snapshot.
Where the CO2 emissions are given as "?" no result could be found using the Website Carbon Calculator.