{"id":13815,"date":"2019-08-30T09:30:46","date_gmt":"2019-08-30T08:30:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/unitedbaristas.com\/?p=13815"},"modified":"2022-01-14T10:32:32","modified_gmt":"2022-01-14T10:32:32","slug":"our-digital-carbon-emissions-out-of-sight-but-lets-not-put-them-out-of-mind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unitedbaristas.com\/articles\/insights\/our-digital-carbon-emissions-out-of-sight-but-lets-not-put-them-out-of-mind\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Digital Carbon Emissions are part of the Coffee Industry’s Environmental Impact"},"content":{"rendered":"
Internet usage is now a leading contributor to global warming, accounting for more than two percent of global carbon emissions (Nature, 2018) \u2013 a higher level than the aviation industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The specialty coffee industry is avid users of social media platforms, apps, forums, and websites, such as United Baristas services. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Digital services such as websites and apps are run on servers, which require significant amounts of energy for their fast computation, as well as vast cooling infrastructure to manage the heat produced from their operation. Electricity is also required to transmit data from servers to our computers, phones and tablets, and electricity is also required to run these devices. A study by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) found that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In testing of specialty coffee industry websites, we found carbon dioxide emissions per page view vary between 1.1 g (benefitting from green electricity production to run servers) to 22.55 g. Poor design, complex scripts and too large images are common causes of higher emission levels. An average page view on United Baristas services produces circa 6 g of carbon dioxide (about average compared with the widely reported, but potentially wrong, figure of 6.8 g per average internet page view).<\/p>\n\n\n\n