Sustainable certification and your website

Many organisations are in the midst of a significant shift in doing business. Increasing their sustainability is the primary driver of this great combined effort. Luckily there are increasingly better metrics available by which organisations can measure their sustainability performance, as well as map their improvement potential. For example: include creating a local purchasing policy, encouraging the use of public transport or measuring water use. These are a few examples of organisations' steps to improve their corporate social responsibility. Every company that has ever been through the certification process, for instance, B Corp, knows that the basis of certification lies in the sum of many small steps combined.

There are multiple ways to look at the role of IT in corporate social responsibility. To avoid CO2 emitted, for example, a conference call instead of a personal meeting with people using transportation – or even flying. Or from the energy mix on which the IT runs. Noteworthy, it is estimated that the internet will use over 25% of our total generated electricity in 2025.

In a third perspective, the reduction potential within data use is also an important pillar. Even though data centres are becoming more efficient, our websites are getting bigger. The CO2 impact, however, is straightforward to quantify. Via an online tool such as Zifera, you get an overview of the CO2 your website is emitting and tips on how to reduce your footprint. The tips you receive do not require significant investments. For example, remove an outdated script from the websites, and place photos in a smaller size and with better compression on your website. These improvements do not require a large investment in money and time and are, therefore, low-hanging fruit when reducing the CO2 footprint of your website. If we let all our websites emit, let's say, 15% less CO2, we have the opportunity to have a huge impact together. And a win-win is that a more efficient website is faster and will perform better.

Is your organisation in the middle of a sustainability process? Then tackle the energy saving of your website: now is the time!