Advancing onwards through the industrial revolution, mass manufacturing, Bitcoin mining, AI – the more advanced we get, the bigger the toll we take on our planet.
The cost of the digital stuff is the biggest bill we’ve ever run up – but more than ever, we’re seeing some of the biggest contributors to global warming start to claim they’re the ones doing the most to protect the environment. Something doesn’t add up.
Let’s not start with the greenwashing
Any discussion about sustainability in any area even remotely related to tech has to start with the assumption that anything we’re doing is just mitigating damage done. And the only way to be truly environmentally sustainable would be to quit our jobs and live off the land.
With that in mind, I’m definitely wary of any tech company that promises environmental sustainability, or actively trades off it. Pinches of salt required.
Everyone from major tech monopolies to small digital startups says they’re sustainable and good for the planet – or can help you be sustainable if you use them.
Everyone from major tech monopolies to small digital startups says they’re sustainable and good for the planet – or can help you be sustainable if you use them.
Are they really making the planet better, or just hurting it a bit less?
Wait a second you hypocrite… “But Lauren,” you might be thinking, if you’ve read any of my articles before, “you work for a sustainable web design agency. Are you saying you’re not actually sustainable?”
Well, sort of. I’m not going to be complacent about it, anyway. When I talk about sustainability at Splitpixel, I tend to talk about us doing things as sustainably as we can, not sustainably full stop.
Although we try very hard, and work on sustainable practices across every area of our business – from the tools we use to where we invest our pension funds – we cannot promise a perfectly sustainable solution. No one can.
Why not?
Let’s start with data centres, those big warehouses where servers live, where your websites live. The data centre and server your website uses probably makes the biggest environmental impact in your organisation.
I’d class a data centre that’s good for sustainability as one that powers its servers with renewable energy, rather than fossil fuels. But no matter what energy is used, data centres take up a huge amount of space, and use a huge amount of water in their cooling methods. They are an inherently unsustainable enterprise.
And what’s more, these centres and servers are owned by corporations that, regardless of reduced environmental impact in some areas, are causing massive harm overall. A certain business owner who recently flew in dozens of private jets for his wedding comes to mind, bringing us to a general “no ethical consumption under capitalism” point.
So being on a sustainable server isn’t enough. It’s a good start, and you should absolutely ensure you use a data centre that runs off as high a percentage of sustainable energy as possible, but you can’t sit back and say job done.
What more can we do?
The perfect website is a white page, with nothing but black text on it. In Arial. It’ll have the fastest load times, meet the best SEO and accessibility standards, and have the least impact on the planet.
If you were serious about digital sustainability, that’s what you would ask for, or that’s what you would deliver. But that’s not how it works, is it? We all want pictures and colours and fancy fonts on our websites. All these use more data, which uses more energy.
So, again, we have to start with the assumption that we are causing harm. We have to approach what we do with the mindset of mitigating that harm and making decisions based on what’s best for the environment.
We can present images on a website as sustainably as possible – but that doesn’t mean you can have a hundred of them without having a big impact on energy usage. Even if you have a ‘sustainable’ solution, you have to be mindful of how to use it to actually be sustainable.
And then there’s AI
No matter how sustainable you are – how much you recycle, how much green energy your servers use, how much you restrict your asset usage – that’s wiped out as soon as you use AI.
According to the UN, which I presume checks their facts, an AI prompt uses 10 times the energy of a Google search and AI usage as a whole uses more water than the entire country of Denmark.
The only environmentally responsible approach to AI use is NOT to use it and any company that boasts sustainable credentials while actively encouraging its use is destroying any good it does.
So, why bother?
If nothing’s perfect, and governments don’t care, and celebrities and businesses drain our natural resources for their own pleasure and profit at a faster rate than we can cancel out with our efforts, what’s the point?
Well, we’ve got to try, haven’t we? We have to hope the message spreads from the as-sustainable-as-possible approaches we take to the arts organisations we build websites for, to their work, to their audiences, to their laptop keyboards and the supermarket shelves and the voting booth.
We have to hope we can plant a seed that grows enough to make a difference.
