eBay Websites Emit Most CO2 Worldwide

I am getting in touch with a data story we have put together on the e-waste impact top websites are having on the environment.

Web design agency Banc has put together a study on the impact website assets have on CO2 emissions. We found that the more asset heavy your website is (with high memory videos and images) the bigger impact this has on the environment.

We also listed the sites both UK and worldwide which have the biggest CO2 emissions. See all findings below.

Please refer to our data here: https://banc.digital/blog/how-your-websites-popularity-might-be-impacting-the-environment

Key Findings:

• eBay is the UK site with the highest monthly emissions, producing 907.8 tonnes of CO2 every month
• Despite it receiving more site traffic each month (~282 million), Amazon UK generates fewer CO2 emissions than eBay
• When it comes to fashion, Next is the clothing site that generates the most CO2 emissions (45.3 tonnes CO2 per month)
• Marks and Spencer had the highest traffic of any fashion website (25,786,823 site visitors monthly) but only generated the third-highest volume of CO2 emissions (​​16 CO2 tonnes per month)
• BBC Good Food was the worst offender for food websites, producing the highest emissions (58.8 CO2 tonnes)
• Twitch was the gaming site with the highest emissions both in the UK and the world, creating 140.4 CO2 tonnes per month in the UK and 3,444.8 CO2 tonnes worldwide
• In fact, Twitch’s is that popular its CO2 tonne emissions were over double the emissions of Steam Community, the UK’s second highest gaming site
• eBay US is the ecommerce site generating the most emissions monthly worldwide (1430.3 CO2 tonnes per months, roughly equivalent to 127,460 gallons of diesel being consumed
• Macy’s is the world’s highest emitting fashion site, generating 276.9 tonnes of CO2 monthly

Senior Content Marketing Manager at Banc, Leanne Coppock said:

“The findings of our study are insightful and shed light on the importance of how your website setup can impact the environment.

There are measures businesses can take to improve the eco-friendliness of websites, cutting down on the amount of data-intensive, energy-sapping imagery used across your site can help. You should also make sure that your site isn’t loading larger images than it needs to; make sure you know the dimensions of your website inside and out – otherwise you could be putting a strain on it. You can also reduce the file size of your imagery – without compromising on quality – with image compressing programs like TinyPNG, and use more efficient file formats such as WebP over JPEGs.

Try to limit the number of different fonts you use, and rely on system fonts like Arial where possible. Likewise, go for web font file formats with better compression methods like WOFF and WOFF2 as opposed to TTF, OFT and SVG file format. Working to a specialist web design agency can ensure you make your site as efficient and eco-friendly as possible.”