Why did we want our website to limit its environmental impact?
Digital technology represents a major part of worldwide economic activity. If we don’t pay attention to its environmental impact, digital development could become the world’s leading consumer of electricity by 2030 (source: European Commission).
The same is true of its carbon footprint. In 2021, digital technology represents 4% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. This is 1.5 times more than air transport (source: The Shift Project study).
In this context, to maintain coherency with our commitments to sustainable development, we decided that our website needed to limit its environmental impact.
How does our website limit its environmental impact?
We focused on key points that enable optimizing the energy consumption generated by our website pages by applying, when possible, the recommendations of the repository for responsible digital design from the GreenIT collective as well as the eco-design guide for digital services from the collective of Ethical Designers.
This meant making choices and meticulously working to ensure that both technical implementation and content meet this goal. From writing texts that are clear, concise and complete, through creating a site that’s pleasant to browse through, to avoiding heavy images that take time to display, each step has been carefully planned.
The advantage for you is a site that’s simple, straightforward and focused on what’s important.
The user experience:
0
functionalities that eat up resources.
We have eliminated all functionalities that use up resources. For example, you won’t find a search engine on our site. It has been designed for fast, simple access to each item of information.
0
newsletters sent.
You won’t be receiving a newsletter from Expanscience. And that’s good news! Worldwide, the sending of emails represents an hourly emission rate of over 400,000 tons of CO2 (source: Cleanfox study).
Content and servers:
0
videos hosted on the site.
There are no videos on our site, which enables considerably limiting the energy they consume. Videos are among the heaviest files: 10 hours of high-resolution film represents more energy consumption than the entire set of articles in English on Wikipedia (source: The Shift Project study).
100%
renewable energy used by our host since 2023.
Our site is hosted on servers that will be using 100% renewable energy since 2023 (source: AWS). We have also opted for a hosting solution using so-called “containers” that allow reducing the site’s carbon impact and its energy balance sheet.
In total transparency, a measured carbon impact
To demonstrate the effectiveness of our site, we have included a carbon-equivalent calculator that you’ll find at the bottom of each page. We have opted for the Website Carbon solution with the aim of being perfectly transparent about the impact of our site on the environment. This solution gives a precise evaluation of the equivalent in grams of CO2 generated by the consultation of each page.
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