All right, hello folks, my name is Chris, I work at the Green Web Foundation. If you've
never seen me before, this is what they're like online, if you can't see me here, if I suppose.
I, for the last 20 years, I've been working in a series of wacky environmental and data themed
startups, like low-co2, which is low CO2 travel around Europe, Amy, which is all about
CO2 calculations over an API. These days, I work at the Green Web Foundation. Can you guess
what the Green Web Foundation is about? Yes, all right, and while we hear today, this is what
I want to share with you in the next 20 or so minutes that we have. I want to help you understand,
how digital services can cause emissions, carbon emissions. I'm going to help you understand the
link between accessibility and the sustainability of websites. We'll look at some concrete examples to
help you think about some of this, and then we'll look at some of the laws and the data sets
that help us fight the good fights for a greener, more inclusive web. Are you all sitting comfortably?
Yes, then I'll begin. All right, how does making a website, more accessible, make it more sustainable?
So before we start, I'm just going to give you a quick word, like there's this turn sustainability
and there's this turn carbon emissions, right? I know they're not the same thing, all right? There's
all these other things we need to think about when we think about sustainability, like biodiversity,
poverty, like pollutants, all of the things here. We only have 20 minutes though, so I'm just
going to focus on carbon emissions, all right? So there is more, and we can touch on that later,
but not in this 20 minutes. All right, so how will you digital services cause emissions?
This is a diagram from the Sustainable Web model, which is one of the most popular models used
for people to work out the carbon footprint of a website. And then we talk about digital services.
We might be playing a game, or watching a video, or buying something on a tablet or an iPhone,
but really there's a really complicated supply chain at work going on, all right? So you've got a
network of always on undersea cables, we've got routers, we've got cell towers, stuff like that,
they're connected to data centers, which always on 24-7 as well, and all these use lots of energy,
and most of the time, most of our power is still coming from fossil fuels, although it is changing
quite fast in certain parts of the world. You think of the energy part as like use phase emissions,
all right? However, someone still has to make all these electronics, all right? So we need to turn
sand into basically silicon chips and stuff like that. That is also extremely energy intensive in
its own right, and you can think of this as like embedding the energy into these kinds of devices.
So people call these embodied emissions, it's embodied into it. Now, should I even care,
like is it big? Is it worth worrying about? So this is the question people ask me a lot of the time,
and this is basically why I say yes, the carbon footprint is about two to four percent is what
people tend to use. If you work in industry, you'll probably say, oh, it's 1.5 to or something like that.
If you work in civil society, you will say it's more like five or six depending on what you choose
to include, all right? And I can share, we've got a leak, we've got a report, which covers this
and lots more detail on this deck. Now, most people don't know what 2 percent of global emissions
is, so I use things to compare it to to make it easier to understand. And people often say,
it's the same as they say, aviation industry. And that's helpful in some ways, but
otherwise it's not so helpful because in aviation, half of the emissions come from one percent of
the flyers. And most people in the world haven't flown and won't ever fly. And I think more than,
I think, we're more people using it. And like, you can't make a joke about maybe 1 percent of the
crypto users making half of the unit from the tech industry, but I'm not sure if that, I don't have
the data to back that up yet. So I would suggest instead talking about shipping, because 90
percent of the goods we use, they come by ship. And it also has a comparable carbon footprint
of around 2 to 3 percent of global emissions. Also, for most of us, shipping isn't something
we experience directly, but we know it takes massive boats just like this, burning all kinds of
really, really dirty fuel to get things around. And almost all of us rely on shipping in the
same way we all rely on the internet. Now, you probably don't want to cut shipping out of your
life, just the same way you don't want to cut the internet out of your life. But there are
things we can do to reduce environmental impact of it, because if the shipping industry is trying
to clean up their act, then maybe we should figure out how to clean up our act as well.
So, okay, so there's a footprint, it's big, but what about my work? Is it big for me?
So, these are some numbers in the real, in the public domain, from organizations you might have
heard of. So, ABNM, that's the third largest bank in the Netherlands. One of their last reports,
they said about 40 percent of their organizational emissions came from digital services, which is
pretty chunky. Salesforce have, on the record, said, yeah, half our emissions come from
things like cloud and stuff like that. They had to build their own in-house models,
because they didn't get the numbers from their upstream supplies, who's, I'm not going to name them,
you can probably guess who they are, all right. And then, Mozilla, when they looked at their
carbon footprint from the use of their digital services, they came up with a really, really large number.
And this number is very, very large, because they included end user use of their services as well.
And this is actually partly one, Mozilla is so keen on making it easy to work out the
energy consumption of things in the browser now, as well.
Now, it's not always the case. So, this is our organization. We try to figure out what the footprint
of our digital estate was last year, last summer. And we used a tool called the tech carbon standard,
which is essentially a way to kind of help us figure out where the emissions were. And what we found
was that actually a significant chunk, we thought it would be all up here, but it turns out,
whole bunch of it is actually from us just using our devices and buying our devices and all
the embodied emissions in that. And if you're curious, there is a link to this in the deck,
because it's all on GitHub as well. That's how we tend to work. So, yes, it's something that you
might want to think about. And it could be large, but I'm not going to say it definitely is large,
it can vary from organization to organization. All right. So, how does making website more accessible?
How does this actually help? How does making a website more accessible make it more sustainable?
So, as in on here, heard of the WCAG, WCAG, the web content or three-guide lines. All right,
I'm going to use some of the language that you folks might know if you're familiar with this.
So, there is a concept called poor, perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. These are the
kind of terms you might use to help understand if a word if a service is actually accessible and not
really. Let's use these to talk about sustainability. So, if something is perceivable,
you know, multiple ways to access the same content with different senses. Now, when we think about
this in the sustainability context, there could be multiple kinds of browsers accessing the same
kind of content. So, you could have a text only browser, which means there's lots and lots of
different devices that can access content, as well as the kind of rich desktop things. This is like
this is helpful because it reduces the amount of induced updates. You're not forcing people to
update all the time. How about operable? So, normally people talk about operable in terms of
okay, do I have a physical accessibility need or something like that? But also, this can apply to just
like damaged and broken devices. So, let's say you have a broken home button on your phone. All right?
Now, there are lots of cases where just having something foundational, that means you,
okay, how do I access services? Do I have to throw the device away? Now, if you've got some
thing design properly, then there are other ways of accessing it because you're looking at
multiple different ways of operating the same kind of device. Now, actually, I friends do this.
My partner has a broken iPhone and has one for the last few months and she's been able to
access services that she otherwise wouldn't be able to. So, which I actually thought was pretty cool.
Understandable. Even if the digital channel for meeting a need is more efficient than the
physical one and that's why people use digital services a lot of the time because it's cheaper and
possibly greener, then it still needs to be usable and intelligible to people. All right? So,
let's say you have people who have low confidence in digital skills. All right? They might have a
really, really efficient way to do something online. But if they don't understand how to use it
and they don't use it, it ends up creating much more demand on all the other channels you need to
provide to allow someone to kind of meet those needs. So, the technical term for this is failure
demand, increased failure demand is what you have. So, this is one idea of understandable and then
robust. Let's say you're going to look at robust in terms of designs and mark up that are able to
work with hardware, with older hardware, older software, they work in low bandwidth environments,
things like this. These are the things you kind of plan for if you're designing things,
if you're thinking about accessibility, this also has an knock on effect. Now, the example I give
here is the learning management system in a university that's still worked with older browsers
and I'll show you why later. But there's also other cases if you have something which doesn't work
with a slow connection. Then people can end up doing things like driving somewhere so they can
get to a fast connection to do something and like we work in a team where someone lives in
a space where they have low bandwidth, they have to drive to an office to share their screen
in our teams sometimes, which gives you an idea of like this is a knock on effect that you don't
think about straight away, but you can plan for. So, that's poor, that's like using accessibility
language to talk a little bit about sustainability. So, let's make this concrete with some more examples.
So, I spoke about learning management systems and there is this really, really cool paper called
stipulated smartphones for students, the requirements of modern technology for academia.
It's by Rob McGinnis and George Porter, and I'm not expecting you to read this, don't worry.
But the general justice of this was that these were researches at a large US university,
looking at what kind of requirements and what tools they had induced harder upgrades by students
and what things they had there. There's loads of stuff inside of them, I'm just going to
pull out the things I can fit in a 20 minute talk. So, to focus our study, we target representative
websites used by students in an undergrad, countryside degree, and they look at things that you've
heard of, Google Drive, Stack Overflow, Google Notebook, Canvas and PRC, I don't know them,
but they are used by some people, right? So, they look at this stuff and they say, well, how
usable are these, for example? And one cool thing they did, that was visual that I could borrow
and show on a screen, was they basically looked at these devices, looked at the services,
then they looked at them, they used tools like browser stack to emulate some of these services.
So, and then they tried to complete common tasks using them, and the green stuff on the right
hand side, these are like the new devices basically. Now, as you go further to the left, they get
older and older and older, and you can see more and more red slipping in, and certain devices just
do not work. And this means that if you're on the left hand side and you need to do something,
then you're often going to, it's not that you're going to not do your degree, you're probably
just going to buy that buy a new device, for example. And this is literally what they say,
given the oversized role that cost the manufacturing place, this is one of the things, they need
to look at the, what kind of updates they're kind of essentially inducing, getting people to do,
and if you can make something which is usable for a longer period of time, so you don't need
to update, there's a saving that you can bring about there. And I can give you a concrete example
of this, just to make it easy to have got some numbers. So, let's see, we've got 20,000 students
at a university, 10% of people have to update their phones, for example, so they can actually
complete their course. Now, I don't know off the top of my head, what the carbon footprint of updating
the phone is, but the folks at Bauer Vista have this really cool tool called Data Vista,
where they can give you some of these numbers. And the short number is that you can basically choose
what kind of things you're looking for, I chose a smartphone, and I can see most of the carbon footprint
I said before was from the embedded part, not the use phase, it's about 80 odd calories,
oh, 80 odd kilograms. So then I can put together some toy mats to help it understand this,
all right, 20,000 students, 10% of that, multiply by that figure, 168,000 kilos, 168 tons.
Now, I wasn't really thinking about that when I was designing services, but it gives you an idea
of, okay, this is like the default that we would like to maybe avoid if we can.
Now, does this mean that I'm both designing things that I'm a bad person if I haven't thought
about this stuff? I don't think it does. I'm not saying you're bad if you're not thinking
about this or you've ever designed a single web page that isn't, that isn't accessible because
we've all done that, but it does give us an idea of what the consequence is all right now,
and it gives us an idea to talk about, okay, here's our baseline, how do we improve this?
The other thing I want to share with you is that this is actually more of a structural problem rather
than an individual problem, and there are all kinds of other drivers, inside this. So in 2025,
if you use a Windows machine, there's been this whole push to basically end of life, Windows 10,
so you need to have like at least two cores in your machine, it's much, you have much greater
processor requirements, things like that, and from a sustainability point of view, this is kind of
bad. From the point of someone who rest of buy a new device to kind of continue on a course or something,
it's kind of bad, but from the point of a shareholder, it's great, so this is like,
this is basically a earnings call, so people are talking rubbing their hands with glee in 2025,
at all these new devices they're going to get bought, all right, so this is people who form say
Lenovo, HP, and they'll just say, yeah, this end of life is the big driver of ourselves this year,
isn't that great? Should we look at some numbers for that as well? All right, so roughly,
these are, I'll shed a link to this to show you the kind of assumptions behind this, all right,
typically, 250 million PCs made, I like to sold each year, all right, average PC life,
lifespan, four and a half years, if that gives us about 1.25 billion PCs in circulation,
as it were, all right, now I looked at the figures, how many are using Windows 10,
it's about 70% still up to them Windows 10, so you have nearly 800 million PCs, and then
let's just say they're all wrapped up, they're not, but you can come up with ideas here,
180 one kilos, you multiply that, that's 144, I'm just going to use that figure because it's
hard to say, right, so 0.15 gigatons, all right, that's the same carbon footprint as the Philippines,
which is 110 million people, this gives you some of the ideas about stuff which is kind of
induced, all right, and this is the thing that I think, as people who are, this is why I think
stuff like post-market and stuff is actually quite important, because if you can extend the
life of these, and you don't need to have this kind of stuff where people are basically
being forced to buy things, which aren't really necessary in only really working for shareholders,
basically. Now, I can't talk about sustainability in AI, without LLM, since I've like that,
so I've got your shareable mean slide here, all right, okay, so you talk about like,
we spoke about alt text and images, right, so let's say we do it at our top, right, that's the
way that a lot of us would use it. Now, increasingly, you can use LLM to help you with this, all right,
now what some people do, if they can't do it in their CMS, they might use a CDN provider,
like CloudFly, that can do stuff like that to kind of add alt text for each of these there,
but there's like 250 points of 250 points of presence that you have, but if you have things
running in the browser, and Missilla are doing a talk later on today about how to run LLM's
inside your browser, you've got 20 million people running LLM's independently, adding slightly
different inconsistent bits of information into this. Now, I think one of these is a slightly
better outcome than the others, all right, but it gives you an idea of like, this is the consequence
of the world we're kind of moving into, all right. So, I said, I chose some laws and data sets
to help you find the good fight for a greener, more inclusive, with. Now, this is the stuff that
I would point you to, which might be relevant, okay? So, this year we have a eco-designed
for sustainable product for regulation coming in. This is essentially about hardware, so that
it's really pushes people to have better design products that can be repaired and can be recycled.
We also have the right to repair directive, and that means, as now, for the first time,
a degree of support to actually repair things, and there's all kinds of support in different countries
to make this easier. I live in Berlin, there was a repair bonus where they would basically pay
half the cost of getting something repaired up to a certain amount. That meant that I might say
fix an iPad, where otherwise it wouldn't be able to do it. And there was also the corporate
sustainability reported directive, which is forcing companies to share information that don't
really want to share about the environmental footprint of various things they do, and they actually
explicitly call out cloud and data synthesis now. And then, if you're in France, this is probably
one that's just the most useful for you, if you're an implementer. They actually have this thing,
the general policy framework, whether you could design a digital services. It's an English,
thankfully, and it has a bunch of activities and like behaviours to look for and ask for
when you're designing projects and moving forward from there. Now, if you want to see what
reports look like right now, the UK government has a really good one. That was published, I think,
two, three weeks ago. It's really, really good. And then, I mentioned that that paper, because
there's loads of really, really cool stuff inside that. And by the way, this stuff are basically,
I love these Frenches. They do so much cool stuff around this, and it's really worth looking at.
And then, now, this year, the W3C is starting to take an interest in this. There was now
a sustainable web interest group, and there is a web sustainability guidelines doctrine,
which has a really, really intimidating amount of links for you to look through.
And that's kind of it. That's 20 minutes. This talk is online. You can also use a QR code,
if you fancy. This is how to get in touch with me, if you want to talk about it as in future.
Climate action tech is basically an online community of tech use who were trying to do stuff
from climate or kind of green the way they work. I do a podcast right into view experts about
this stuff. So, I can learn, and I guess by extension, I don't know who's listening along.
And then, Branch is a magazine where people are trying to embody some of these ideas
and how they design it. And I think that's my time. So, thank you for your attention.
I don't know if I've got, if I've got much time for questions, maybe one.
Oh, we do have, oh, goody. Okay. So, in that case, I do have time to
feel some questions, if anyone has any questions. Oh, yes, gentle with the back.
Yeah, companies are losing their shit out of it. I'll give you an example, which is my favorite.
All right, so, so where is it? Yes, this one is pretty cool. Do tech firms need to report their
revenue from the oil and gas sector now. All right, and CSID. So, yes, basically, we found
that there is a data point specifically about how much money they're getting from oil and gas.
So, it's, here we are. Yeah, that's one thing they actually definitely do have. So,
yes, you have people freaking out about this. And also, let's see, ESRS. Here's the cool thing about this.
Is that a bunch of it is actually online now? From, yeah, here we are. Now, let's make this a bit larger.
So, this is law that we can point to right now. Oh, God, I've just just got it wrong there.
But I made it to large. So, written in the law. Okay. Shoutout to scholars, emissions,
from purchase cloud computing and data center services as a subset of this, go through
that upstream goods and services. Like, you can just hyperlink to this stuff now.
So, yes, companies are losing their shit about it because places like France, for example,
if you do not disclose it, it carries present terms for the directors of the companies.
It's like, oh, I better get it right now, you know. In fact, there is, where it's something.
Yeah, so, you get it to liberty, CSID here. So, that's the kind of gag we came up with internally.
And to other many other questions. Yes, James.
And I took to a maximum of devices. Yes.
I think there's some moves to the requiring open good business and things, because in my office,
I have three old iPads that still work. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I can't install any else. I think there's actually might be some of the eco-designed
directive stuff, which is saying that you cannot, that you need to provide a degree of support
and guidance for people who to use the hardware because, like,
weight electronics is the fastest growing waste stream in Europe. And we are the world leaders in
generating waste. We're even worse than Americans. So, like, sorry, I mean, we are put put put put
put putting putting more than Americans on a per capita basis. Yeah. So, yes, there is, there is
stuff like that. And this is where one place, I think that Europe as it were, the European
Commission is hoping to kind of be something of a leader. But there's also, there's also the
distillation in America and Brazil and India about rights to repair and being able to extend
the lives of your devices. So, well, any other questions before I get kicked off?
Hello. Hello. So, you're right. So, the question? Yes. So, you're right. So, the question,
for everyone else is basically, if you're going to be using our devices, are you not leaving
people open to all the attacks because they're out of support and stuff like that? So, yes,
this is actually a trade-off. And I'm not saying that you should definitely use old stuff as
much as you can, because I think we should be prepared to make or make what's the word, oh, oh,
is it okay? Okay. I think we need to make trade-offs about which, what I'm prioritizing here.
So, it maybe says some things I'm okay with if I'm in a, if I'm not in a kind of high risk
environment, for example. But this is actually, like we said before, a structural problem
a lot of the time, because the thing with the Microsoft, for example, the thing they're driving
is they want to have a trusted computing module inside their computers, which is why they're
pushing this. So, they're making a security argument straight away. So, not every security argument
is the same. And there are various things that you can do with, in my review, open source tooling
to address some of this. But that will probably require more funding. So, things like funding
groups like post-market and all the other groups, so actually, you've set some sensible, usable defaults.
Yes, I think you should have funding going into that. In my dream world, once things
can't fall out of there, once they get hit in the life, all the source code is available for
other people to maintain it. Because if you're not going to take care of it, someone has to.
Right? We're not there yet, but I know that's what policy is a good leave before. You can use
like a baseball bat to catch you like get something done. So, yeah, that was it. Yes.
Well, the thing that the problem with this absolute device is, and why they can follow to
make us to throw them away, because they are good dust in their travels, they're useless.
So, it's like the equipment, the loss of the, it's, at some point, it's shown to become
fresh, and we need just, I mean, what's the one? Yeah. And we just have not the ability to
do the minor operation, the device is like, for example, why we cannot put any of them
on this laptop, why we can't. So, this is, there are signs that this is actually,
there are promising signs in this. So, who's heard of a framework laptop, right?
Has anyone seen that thing where they offer like the risk v, the risk v, like main board,
you could just plug into it? So, totally separate companies, like, it's like 20 years ago,
we used to be able to do it with like, desktop. There are promising signs, but we probably need
to support that kind of stuff, and, well, I mean, I'm using an Apple Mac, and I'm probably
going to be stuck with it for a while, but the next thing I buy, I definitely wanted
to use a replaceable and upgradable for this reason. All right, I'm my number time.
Brilliant. Okay, thank you, everyone.