Creating a Carbon Literate Society with Our Client Clever Carbon

Did you know that even your website makes an impact on the environment? To celebrate Earth Day, SiteGround launched an educational campaign that helps website owners calculate their site carbon footprint as well as offer optimization tips and tricks to help reduce CO2 emissions. 

However, our efforts did not stop there. It’s important to remember how all our individual everyday actions add up to a cleaner and healthier Earth. We invited our client, Michelle Li, to share her insights on how we can live a greener life. Hosted on SiteGround, she founded clevercarbon.io with a mission to build a carbon literate society and help people make clever carbon decisions for themselves and our planet.

Learn About Carbon Footprint in a Simple and Hip Way

In her quest to understand and reduce her carbon footprint, Michelle was unpleasantly surprised that most of the websites she visited were full of confusing technical data. How can someone understand their carbon footprint when it appears that the majority of educational websites are overly complicated?

That motivated her to start Clever Carbon, with the mission to educate people about their carbon footprint in a fun, hip, and relatable way. The Clever Carbon team manages to simplify the complexities of carbon footprint data so that everyone can understand the problem and implement solutions. At the heart of their work stands the carbon footprint quiz which helps people understand the things in their daily lives that generate carbon footprint.

3 Tips to Reduce Your Personal Footprint

A person’s highest individual carbon footprint comes from their home energy use, their diet and transportation choices. Together with Michelle, we prepared a few day-to-day actions that you can take to limit your impact on the environment.

First you can start by calculating your carbon footprint here.

Smart energy consumption at home

While electricity generation is shifting toward more renewable sources, home energy consumption still accounts for the majority of our emissions. Some simple actions you can take to reduce the consumption are:

• Unplug your phone charger, monitor or any other electrical device when it isn’t in use.
• Use energy-efficient light bulbs.
• Turn off lights when you’re not using them.
• Choose renewable sources when possible.

Plant-based Diet

Did you know that emissions are directly related to what we eat? When it comes to food, we must examine what happens during manufacturing as well as transportation. Here’s what you can do: 

• Fill your plate with vegetables, fruits, grains and beans. 
• For meat-lovers, swap a few meals per week to vegan or vegetarian. 
• Choose local and seasonal food.

Commuting

Carbon dioxide emissions from transportation are a well-known issue. There’s no need to get rid of your car just yet, but here are several things you can do better:

• Choose public transportation or even biking when possible. 
• Consider switching to an electric vehicle. 
• Carpool to work to split the emissions between the number of people in the car.

3 Tips to Reduce Your Website Footprint

It may surprise you, but on average, a website generates 1.76g of CO2  per visit due to all of the processing power required to load and deliver to users all over the world. Don’t worry, there are several things you can do to create a more sustainable website. The good news is that most of the actions are based on best website practices, so it’s a win-win situation for both the planet and your business.

Choose a Green Web Host

Start by choosing a host committed to minimizing data centers energy consumption and is running on renewable sources. On top of that it offers blazing-fast speed for your website success with top security measures in place, like SiteGround.

Optimize Your Website

From caching to media and front-end optimizations, your website will get lighter and page load faster, saving energy from the processing time. Here are some actions you can take: 

• Enable Full-page Caching: Caching is a sure way to speed up your website. Our powerful full-page (Dynamic) caching solution can make your website 5 times faster with no additional settings required.

• Optimize media and front-end: Your website is the face of your business and you want it to stand out. But media and front-end files can surely slow your website. With our easy SiteGround Optimizer plugin for WordPress, you can enjoy powerful website optimizations with a click.

• Use a CDN: The purpose of a CDN service is to reduce the distances between server and user. With SiteGround’s free CDN, you’ll be able to speed up your website for users who are browsing from all over the world.

Write Clear Web Content

On-point content and user-friendly experience will help your website get easily found. This way, you’ll save users time from surfing the internet all day and lower their energy consumption.

Find more information on the relation between website speed and carbon emissions on our dedicated page. 

Make Better Decisions for Our Planet

“Starting our carbon literacy journey is an important way for each of us to make small, but better decisions for our planet.” It creates a pattern where each person can make smarter and healthier choices in our daily lives.