Greenalytics: a tool for marsh-up life cycle assessment of websites

Abstract

The environmental impact of internet is growing, reaching an estimated 1.4% of world greenhouse emissions. This impact is hidden for both users and developers. Understanding and analyzing the environmental footprint of a website is not an easy task. The impacts are distributed through multiple hardware networks and a global user base making the individual impacts difficult to allocate. This article presents the development of a functional application for generating automatic life cycle assessments for web sites based on mashing-up information. This application has the aim of making the impact of websites visible, allowing the instant analysis of their carbon footprint using existing analytics data and presenting it in an understandable and transparent way. The development process is presented with detailed information about how the calculations are performed. The results are discussed around two different cases, focusing on the challenges of calculating the server side impact and the possibilities for improvement.