Web Carbon Auditor

Calculates the carbon footprint from digital services and provides technical insights to help raise awareness for making sustainable internet

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Inspiration

IF THE INTERNET WAS A COUNTRY IT WOULD BE THE 7TH LARGEST POLLUTER

Carbon emissions are affecting the environment and digital services are also playing their part. We need to implement sustainable design practices or raise awareness how we can make them greener.

How WebCarbonAuditor can help monday app users?

For SEO/UX team and developers, it will help them to compare the competitor results from theirs and technical analysis to improve the performance

Simple calculator for Email Carbon emission just to analyze how much carbon will be generating from our send/receive emails or even when they are stored in servers.

There are more than 4 billion email accounts worldwide and Spam Email Traffic

What it does

It calculates the carbon footprint from websites and provides insights about website's performance related to sustainable eco design, also gives you rough estimate about daily send/receive emails carbon emissions.

You have to install this app from marketplace and there will be two recipes:

  1. Web Carbon Footprint (Website column must be created by user) Select the website column or device type(mobile or desktop). Our board should have Website column if not then we should create it and input the Website URL in it. As you input the data in column and hit enter it will populate the carbon footprint and performance attributes in respective columns like C02, Speed, EmissionPerVisit and Unused resources etc.

  2. Email Carbon Estimator(Daily Email Count column must be created by user) Enter count for daily send/receive emails and it will populate the fields with estimated carbon emission from spam, short, long or attachment emails

How we built it

Used Recipe integration in which if there's any change in website column we will pass that website link to Google PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse via API to calculate the page size, speed or unused resources, retrieve the hosting either its green or not using TGHWF(TheGreenHouseWebFoundation)'s API and then pass page size(bytes) and hosting status to CO2.js library to calculate CO2.

Co2 offers two models:

  • 1byte
  • Sustainable Web Design

WebCarbonAuditor uses Sustainable Web Design Model

For email carbon emission we use these facts(emissions measured in grams of CO2e):

  • 0.03g - 1 spam email
  • 0.2g - short email going phone to phone
  • 0.3g - short email from laptop to laptop
  • 17g - long email - 10min to write, 3 min to read
  • 26g - one email, 10min to write, 3min to read sent to 100 people of whom 99 ignore after 3 seconds as not relevant and 1 person read.

Challenges we ran into

Criteria to measure carbon emission and relevant libraries.

Emission Calculation Formulas

Carbon Intensity

Daily Emails

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Build a solution through which we can calculate the carbon emission from digital services

What we learned

  • Monday App Development.
  • Learned about sustainable web designs parameters.

What's next for WebCarbonAuditor

There are a lot of other parameters that Google Page Speed API returns we can use it or get through other APIs and we will calculate carbon from video streaming services like Zoom, TikTok, Facebook Watch etc.

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