Bear with me on this…. I came across this CNN article discussing how much CO2 is emitted when browsing the Web. Their study places CO2 generation at 20 milligrams per second spent on the Web. This had me interested is how much CO2 I indirectly generate based on site visitors and how much time they spend on my site. You’ll notice I receive little traffic – so the number crunching was fairly easy, and I suppose that’s good for the environment, however, to see a full determined road trip in my stats wouldn’t be disheartening.
To tackle this, I started playing around with the Google Analytics export data API. I found an open source php interface for retrieving the analytics data and with a few modifications I used this as a proxy to deliver my analytics XML content to Flash. The result: I’m visually displaying my site traffic since January 1st, 2009. Along with visitors-per-day and total-time-per-day – I’m multiplying time by the stated 20 milligrams per second. To compare that to something a bit more tangible, I’m showing the equivalent CO2 emitted per mile from a vehicle averaging 30mpg. There are numerous variations out there on how much CO2 is emitted per mile, but I’m going with ~300g per mile from what I found.
I believe I have the math correct, disregarding the variation in averages of how much CO2 a car produces per mile or an individual emits while online. One other interesting note: If I use the same 20mg of CO2 per second, and multiply that by the time I’ve spent creating and implementing this chart – the CO2 emitted equates to 3.36 miles driven. Granted, this will be more as much of the computer work probably used more energy than browsing the Web. I can’t say this is scientifically accurate, but it is a fun experiment.
2011 View the interactive chart here.
2010 View the interactive chart here.
2009 View the interactive chart here.
One Comment
this is really cool.
Cool idea and very nice graphics.