Episode 2: Introduction to the Environmental Pillar of Sustainability  ## Metadata - Author: [[Sustain WP]] - Full Title: Episode 2: Introduction to the Environmental Pillar of Sustainability - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/3eca60bd-c5d3-40d9-ac84-b70935b3965e ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Educate with EcoGrader Tool** - Use EcoGrader to educate clients unfamiliar with digital sustainability. - The tool provides actionable recommendations to improve website sustainability and user experience. Transcript: Speaker 2 Sure, yeah, absolutely. So as backstory, Eco-Grator was released on Earth Day 2013. Initially, our team took Friday afternoons off for about 11 to 12 weeks, and we put together a custom script and launched a tool that basically allowed you to crawl a URL, and it would Give you digital sustainability recommendations on how you might improve that URL. And we did that because in 2011, we became a certified B Corp, and when we became a certified B Corp, we learned a lot about sustainability and started thinking about how that applies To us as a digital agency, and started really applying sustainability principles to the digital products and services that we create and use. And so what happened is when we started talking to clients and other stakeholders about digital sustainability, we realized very quickly that they had no idea what we were talking About. They just had no clue what we were talking about. And you know, some were admittedly a little skeptical, and they didn't see how sustainability applies to a website. They still thought the internet was a green medium because it replaced paper. You know, so what we wanted to do with EcoGrader when we launched it was to create an awareness tool because we realized that education was going to be a huge mammoth hurdle around all Of this stuff. And it still, you know, education is still a thread through everything that we do as well as, you know, as an important part of digital sustainability overall. And so we launched EcoGrader in 2013. We've done multiple variations of it over the years, the most recent of which was launched on Earth Day of this year, 2023. And you know, we've done all sorts of additional metrics to help people kind of understand things like data transfer and page weight and page performance and interactivity and user Experience and how all of these things can potentially relate to digital sustainability. So that's EcoGrader's sole purpose. And then moving forward, our goal is to make it an ESG platform for all digital products and services. But that's a much more longer term, ambitious, you know, kind of hill to climb for sure. Right now it just crawls a single URL. We're working on a version that will allow you to crawl a full domain or a section of domains or a selection, you know, based on traffic or based on a number of different criteria. With the idea being that it can be an improvement tool to help web teams, you know, make digital sustainability improvements, which of course, you know, also impact user experience And energy use. You know, there's all kinds of, there are really no downsides to taking a digital sustainability approach to, you know, your website or something similar. ([Time 0:13:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e6373252-b163-4126-b77b-8ee496ea5dc5)) - **Design Effective Sustainability Tools** - Adopt design that is visual and lightweight for sustainability tools themselves. - Provide clear checklists with prioritized, actionable improvements for users. Transcript: Speaker 1 Yeah, I really like the last update. It was a really rebump in design. And also I think it's much more actionable now. So you can see your grade, which is nice based on color or whatever. But then you have different sections. And if you click, you can see more information about it and what you can do about it. So I think that's with the educational purpose in mind, I think that's really powerful. And I've been recommended it quite a lot since you had it. Speaker 2 Well, thank you. I very much appreciate that. That's great. And I appreciate, I'm glad you appreciate the design updates that we were. That was absolutely our choice as we wanted to make it more visual, more interesting and you know, use a lot of data visualization without weighing down the page unnecessarily. I mean, we're still trying to apply digital sustainability concepts to eco greater itself and make it as lightweight as possible and such. But it does, you know, it does do a lot on the back end, you know, that people may not be aware of in order to give you those lists of recommendations. You know, and hopefully our goal is then also to create, to use those recommendations to create checklists. So you can actually say, all right, well, I've got 20 things I need to do. Here's my low hanging fruit. ([Time 0:16:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7efdabfc-ff32-4cdf-af71-265d3ecc11f4)) - **W3C Guidelines' Long-Term Vision** - Digital sustainability guidelines require broad collaboration and time to evolve into standards. - W3C community group's work offers potential to reach a global audience and unify best practices. Transcript: Speaker 2 Other websites? Sure, absolutely. Happy to do that. Yeah, and I'll do the same with EcoGrader. You know, the community group actually started in 2013 with a similar goal of saying, all right, well, we know there needs to be education and awareness around all of this. And there needs to be best practices and kind of how do you do this? And basically answer questions that people are going to have. And so I and Jacobs, who at the time, I believe, was the head of marketing for the World Wide Web Consortium, which is the standards body for the web, encouraged me to create a community Group. And so for the first, you know, probably seven years, it was just a handful of people sharing things that they found and kind of it was a very small, very loosely defined group. But then the pandemic hit and a bunch of different things happened, one of which was that people were because everybody was working from home, awareness around the idea of the fact that, You know, every device that we use requires electricity and a lot of it. And there are billions of those devices around the planet. People were starting to have a much broader awareness of digital sustainability. And so it seemed that the time was right to, you know, kind of kick the idea of sustainability guidelines into high gear. And so we started doing some recruiting, you know, at the time, I think the community group only had about 50 members of it wasn't very active. And then in 2021, you know, we kicked it into high gear and I asked a bunch of people in my network to say, Hey, can you share with your networks? This is a thing that we're thinking about doing with the goal of creating some guidelines, you know, that could help web developers and product managers and business leaders and UX Designers help digital professionals actually manage the process of digital sustainability. And so for the past year and a half or two years or so, we've been meeting every month. We've been talking about our goals and how we meet those goals and specifically leading up to W3C's annual conference, which took place in Spain and September. We were our goal was to get our first draft of the guidelines done. So we had over 50 contributors total and a core group of about 25 that was really working diligently every month on that. The group broke down into five different committees around metrics, UX design, web development, business and product strategy, hosting and infrastructure, you know, essentially Different disciplines that kind of fall under the umbrella of digital sustainability. Each of those committees had chairs and those chairs took care of kind of overseeing that getting those first draft guidelines done. And then Alex Dawson and I co-chaired the overall group and he and I shepherded the guidelines through to the final, you know, kind of the final edits for consistency from set to set to Set. And then we worked with Lucas Mastellair's to present at TPAC in September. And that was kind of the official launch of the first draft. And our second draft is actually right around the corner and will be done in time for our monthly meeting, which is at the end of October. So we already are, you know, working on that and, you know, kind of to differentiate your earlier point, right now it is a community group, which means it's made up of mostly non W3C members In order for us to get on the standards track. Now remember W3C is the organization that created the accessibility standards for the web. In order for us to get on a similar track, which is our eventual goal, we need to create a working group, you know, there needs to be several W3C members involved with that working group. And we need it. There's a number of different steps that we need to go through. So we are at the beginning of a very long journey, you know, to standardize all of this. But you know, it's also in a very exciting time because there really haven't been any other guidelines. There have been other guidelines that have been produced. I think there haven't been any other guidelines that have the potential to reach as many people as these do. You know, there are guidelines that have been done in the EU and in France and a few independent groups have put together guidelines. And we definitely referred to those guidelines and looked at them as inspiration for our own. And so they were definitely included. But I think with the W3C behind us, it's a really exciting, you know, way for us to get these guidelines out to a much broader audience. ([Time 0:18:27](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a857e3bb-1d45-4b0f-a13c-22a6a9cf9b1c)) - **WordPress Optimizes for Sustainability** - WordPress made an inefficient HTTPS check request twice daily on all sites, wasting significant energy. - WordPress performance improvements, like image resizing and caching, reduce environmental impact and speed up sites. Transcript: Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, I think I like, I mean, I'm sure you would guess I am super interested in the environmental aspect of inability. And I feel like probably there's a lot of improvements we can make there, what I would call low hanging fruit or sort of like easy things to fix because by and large in web development and Kind of tech in general, but certainly in web development, we've taken this approach of like always having more resources, you know, the Moore's Law of everything doubling. And even in the web, we see like the size of images have just grown and grown and grown. And like our phones, you know, modern phones take these gigantic super high resolution images that probably no one really needs. All of those additional kind of like features that we've sort of grown to love also have a cost to them. They have an energy cost, they have a storage cost. So I am sort of a fan of like going back to simpler, simpler times, I guess, on the web five years ago. Sure. I mean, we talked about this a little bit, but first of all, you know, when you're hosting a site, there is that sort of overhead of running the web server, there's someone's got to maintain That whole infrastructure of server farm, you know, whatever they're called it. And those typically consume a lot of energy. There are a lot of people who are investing in green energy. So I think when you're choosing hosting, you can choose a green host now pretty easily. So that's really on us to make that choice. The other part of it is, you know, at any time someone visits your website, there's there's an environmental or energy cost there because you have all that data that has to be both loaded And and sent over the network to those users. There's probably some calculations about how far away those users are, probably makes it cost more. Obviously, typically as a website owner, you want more traffic. So that's not something you're going to be able to reduce. But there are things that that the web server does that maybe can be reduced. So like the example that we were talking about before, it was is a very small example. But one of the features that WordPress has had was the HTTPS check. So this is a check to make sure that your website is running HTTPS or has a secure certificate in place so that it can be accessed securely. And there was a big initiative several years ago to kind of improve the rate, you know, the number of sites that use HTTPS just to make the web more secure in general. It used to be very expensive to implement and only like e-commerce stores really could could justify the cost. Now it's very easy, you know, to get a secure certificate and have a secure site. And something like 85% of sites are already on HTTPS. And the the excessive thing that WordPress was doing was checking to see if you had HTTPS support after you already had it and after we already know that most people already have it. So it was kind of an old something that was left in there. But but what the result was is that every WordPress site in the world was making twice a day was making a request to itself to check to see if it had HTTPS. So does it sound like a lot to request today? But when you multiply that by the hundreds of millions of sites that run WordPress, that's a really significant amount of energy being consumed for essentially a pointless task. So those are the low hanging fruits where I feel like, you know, having a website, you shouldn't necessarily be incurring those costs. You know, I think as a website owner, you can make choices about where you place things. But but for core for WordPress core, we have a responsibility to be as lean and as efficient as possible. You know, we already do some things really well, but we can improve them. You know, another example is images. You know, when you upload an image that you've taken on your phone, that's a huge image. And WordPress helps you by by taking that image and then creating multiple variations of sizes for the front end of your site so that when a user comes on a mobile device that has a much Smaller screen, we can serve them a much smaller version of that image. And that's an example of saving resources, because if you serve them that huge original image, they're getting all this data that they don't actually need. They can't see it's not usable. It slows down the site. And at the same time, it wastes all this bandwidth. And I think actually that brings us to the connection between performance and sustainability. So I've been very active on the performance team in WordPress core. You know, we've been working on it for a year and a half. And a lot of the things we are doing are really do improve sustainability. So just for example, reducing excess database calls or doing better caching so that when you visit a page and the page needs information about a post that gets cached so that, you know, All the other components of the page can use the cache instead of hitting the database multiple times. So those are like their internal things that aren't necessarily interesting to end users, but they are making the platform itself more efficient. And in general, you know, most of the performance related initiatives are also sustainable related because they're about reducing resource consumption, making things faster typically Means reducing what the work you're doing. It's not always true. There are some exceptions. So and I like to point them out just because I think it's good for people to be aware of things like this. But I did one exception that I thought of recently is we're, you know, trying to introduce the idea of preload and prefetch in WordPress. So this is something you can do on the front end. Just as a simple example, when a user goes to click on a link, as they're hovering over that link, you can sort of prefetch that page that they're about to click on. And then when they do click on the link, you get that page to load much faster. Now, if they decide not to click on the link for some reason, you've wasted the resources of trying to load that page for the user in advance. And the more you do that, the more you're sort of wrong about those guesses, the sort of worst the situation gets. Of course, you can actually wait till they put the mouse click down and start the prefetch. And that still gives you like 100 millisecond advantage to waiting to the browser to actually start navigating. So this is something like Chrome can actually do. But on the WordPress side, like I have a ticket open, for example, when you navigate to the posts list page, very likely the next page you're going to go to is the editor page. So we should probably prefetch that so that users can this great experience of clicking on edit. And then the editor's loads instantly. That's an amazing improvement and experience for users, which is really what performance is about, right? We're actually we call performance, but we're chasing a better user experience. That's our underlying goal. So here we can have a situation where creating a better user experience doesn't actually equal a more sustainable approach, because you're you're guessing the user's going to go to This page, you're preloading that page some percentage of the time you're wrong, and therefore you're wasting resources at the same time you're making the experience better for users. So I think there is a balancing act sometimes to choose a path that you ([Time 0:24:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bfe71ec3-0225-4cfd-a8f9-095ff62c2be0)) - **Open Source as Environmental Tool** - Open source sustainability is linked to broader environmental and social issues. - Minimizing duplicated work through shared data commons helps humanity's survival in this century. Transcript: Speaker 5 I was at a conference last week, and there was a running joke that you knew that the conversation was about to end because all conversations around software sustainability ended with We have to fix capitalism first. It's really similar to environmental sustainability, like yes, social and capital and politics. Yeah, we got to fix those things and they all sort of come back to, well, there's long-standing ways that humans work together that are just inherently screwed. So how do we fix those things? In terms of open source sustainability, that's something where I differ from most of the other people in sustain OSS, who I think are a lot more focused on open source as a community, On communities of open source practitioners, on code itself. And I've always sort of wondered why we don't tackle more the environmental aspect. And for me, this is partially, I feel, because a lot of conversations around open source sustainability are myopic. They're focused on the issue of open source as if that's the biggest issue in the world. It's not the biggest issue in the world. The biggest issue in the world is what are we doing here as a species and why do we exist. The second biggest issue is having to not destroy ourselves by making the environment horrible. And so for me, open source is part of the way that we build a shared data commons. So that we can together minimize duplicated effort so that in this very short period of time, when we're alive as humans right now, this century, we're able to make it not die horribly In the next 50 years. ([Time 0:32:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2ac36f29-0522-4f8d-bfdc-141840fbfaf3)) - **Sustainability in WordPress Events** - WordPress community events focus on environmental sustainability of event logistics. - Consider energy sources powering data centers and infrastructure behind digital delivery. Transcript: Speaker 6 So what I'm thinking about WordPress specifically, and this is not digital sustainability more broadly, but in the context of WordPress, I am working in the community space. And so I'm thinking about it. When I think about sustainability and WordPress, I'm thinking from the lens or the perspective of WordPress community events and how they can be more sustainable. So that is a bit different than digital sustainability more broadly, which is about where, quite literally, where the internet lives, where, how are data centers powered? How is all of this information that's getting stored in the cloud powered? Where is that energy coming from? ([Time 0:34:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/135a98c3-8e45-4b1d-8ee1-9dae45343157)) - **Environmental Lessons for Other Pillars** - Environmental pillar shows clear, simple improvements that individuals can make. - Other sustainability pillars need similar accessible strategies to inspire broad involvement. Transcript: Speaker 7 I think the environmental pillar is something that we've seen that small gestures can improve quite a lot in the general terms. And for the other pillars, there are still many, many things to talk about because we don't really know like, is this something that we can really help with or this is something for governments Or just big industries or whatever. And I think that it would be nice if we can translate these things that we've been doing about environmental to the other pillars because everyone can realize how recycling something Or don't waste in wherever they have. It's good for the global world. Speaker 1 But we don't see that for the other pillars or I don't know maybe. No, no, you're right on point indeed when we talk about digital sustainability. ([Time 0:35:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/916a5891-aa2c-410d-ae7f-d319ebcc62b6))