A Lighter, Brighter 2025: Taking Action on Digital Sustainability
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In an age of endless streaming, infinite scrolling, and overflowing inboxes, we generate more digital waste than ever before. While “the cloud” may sound innocent and environmentally neutral, the reality is stark: internet usage accounts for 3.7% of global emissions, matching the entire aviation industry’s footprint. And that’s before we’ve started talking about AI’s increasing and exponential demands on our resources.
Digital sustainability has been at the forefront of the Wove and Aad mindset for some time now. Over the past 3 years, as we’ve made our BCorp journey, our teams have learned a lot about this space. And as we have, we’ve integrated new practices into our design processes; educated our clients when possible; and regularly discussed and tracked the topic internally. Thinking about ways to reduce the environmental impact of the work we do for our clients has become somewhat of an agency obsession.
Tackling the climate emergency in meaningful ways requires real systematic change, joined up across the public and private sectors. We need enhanced education about digital environmental impact, stronger regulatory frameworks and more effective implementation of sustainable practices.
Sharing Our Journey: A Free Digital Sustainability Resource
While systemic changes take time, we wanted to take action within our industry by sharing our practical learnings, and some context around the issue, in the form of a free Digital Sustainability resource, linked here. If anything we see this resource as a starting point, something to grow and expand as we learn more about this evolving topic.
As we move onto 2025 we are keen to keep the conversation going and share our knowledge. On the site we have included a Dig Deeper section which we plan to keep populated with the latest thinking and insights from our industry and beyond. Please feel free to suggest articles or resources to include in this section as we build it out.
Also, if you have any digital sustainability tips or tricks to share, please send them our way.
Here’s to a cleaner, brighter 2025.
Wove and Aad.
Take action
If you work in design or adjacent fields, we encourage you to:
1. Share this resource within your professional network
2. Contribute your knowledge and experiences
3. Implement sustainable digital practices in your work
A note on the design and production of our Digital Sustainability site.
The site has a rating of A for its energy use. The main reasons for this are:
Font Choices: We used our brand typeface Ballinger. Although loading custom fonts can add weight, we kept it light by using only one weight throughout. And by making savings elsewhere
Imagery & Animation: Video and motion can be heavy. But we weren’t going to let that limit us creatively. Using Lottie — a web-based ultra-lightweight animation tool — we were able to incorporate motion while keeping things super light weight.
Hosting: The site is hosted with Green Geeks who run on green energy AND run carbon offsetting initiatives.
Analytics: The less metrics you track, the less emissions you generate. As such we are only tracking visitor numbers to the site, using a carbon conscious tool, Cabin Analytics.
