Eco-Friendly Website Design
Monday, March 30th, 2009
We all need to be more aware of the impact our actions have on the environment. I’ve always been fairly eco-friendly here at Pixelwave Web Design although it has to be said that my motivation was often to reduce costs (which I can then pass onto my clients) rather from a moral obligation to ’save the world’. However, I’ve recently become a registered ‘Green Achiever‘ so thought I’d comment on my green credentials here.
Of course, as a freelance website designer I do need to use some energy and can’t be completely carbon neutral. My office does have a fairly powerful computer in it and I use two screens for my website design and development work, I also have several external hard drives attached to it along with other peripherals such as routers, USB hubs etc etc. All of these consume power. The good news is that I do always switch it all off when I’m not working, and peripherals such as printers and scanners are only switched on when I need them. I do have another computer that is on 24 hours a day, but this drives the Borth and Ynyslas Weather Station which serves files to the web every minute of every day so can’t be switched off. It doesn’t use a huge amount of energy though and rarely has any additional devices attached to it, even the monitor is usually switched off.
As far as heating and lighting goes, then I’m a home worker so I’m not heating and lighting a separate office, just a room in the house. Being a modern house we are well insulated, have efficient heating and energy saving light-bulbs, so energy consumption there isn’t too bad. I’m also a firm believer in an extra jumper in the winter rather than turning up the thermostat. I do have to keep my working environment fairly comfortable, it is afterall a little difficult to type with mittens on, but if I close the office door it actually gets quite warm in here anyway.
Elsewhere around the house we are pretty good at switching things off rather than leaving them on standby. We have an energy monitor which shows us exactly how much electricity we are using at any given moment, so we can see which items use up the most and are careful to keep our monthly consumption as low as possible. We’re not perfect, but no-one is and ironically the energy monitor itself uses up a tiny amount of electricity, but I think it is worth it as it does make us aware of our consumption.
Being eco-friendly in the home and office isn’t just about saving electricity though. Working from home means I’m not using petrol or diesel for a commute every morning and evening which has to be a good thing. We’re also very good at conserving water. It’s a long story, so I won’t go into it but we had several years without any drains here so got very used to using next to no water. We’re still pretty careful and have also recently installed some water-butts in the garden too, so don’t waste water there either. As far as waste goes then everything that can be is recycled and shredded paper and kitchen waste is all composted.
There are still plenty of other things we could do to improve. Overall I feel that Pixelwave Web Design is a fairly ‘green’ business which is why I registered as a ‘Green Achiever’. The scheme itself doesn’t really mean a huge amount but it does make people aware of their impacts which can only be a good thing.
