Is Your Website Green?

On Digg today was a link to an interesting blog widget. When installed on your blog, the widget calculates the "carbon footprint" of the electricity used by your blog's visitors' computers - calculated based upon the length of visit on your site.

They also offer the ability to purchase carbon offsets, to help make your web presence completely "carbon neutral". Carbon offsets are a "tax" meant to subsidize the development of "clean" energy development and deployment, like solar, wind powered generators etc...

Interesting concept.

About 15 years ago, I was Director of Marketing for a business to business catalog company. We were environmentally aware (I couldn't call us sensitive, since we mailed hundreds of thousands of catalogs) and so we did a couple of things to reduce our environmental impact. First we printed all catalogs on recycled paper stock, using water soluble inks.

Secondly, we reduced the amount of catalogs we mailed, by actually asking mailroom clerks to help us "clean" (update) our mailing lists (which in the business world, get out of date pretty quickly).

We also used account scoring techniques (to help us better predict who would buy) to reduce our mailings into each company.

I think if I were in the same position today, I'd consider applying this widget to my online shopping website and convince my boss to devote a portion of our sales to the purchase of carbon offsets.

If your corporate mission statement contains phrases like "environmental responsibility" or if you're selling "natural" or recycled products, this widget might just help reinforce your environmental responsibility message.

Is this something your company might do?

Am I alone in this?