The climate crisis won’t solve itself. 

It’s going to require a shift in the way we all live our lives on a day to day basis. Climate science has a consensus on the solutions. But some of our fossil fuel enabled habits are going to have to change. We will require a change in mindset but this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. 

Some of our policies at Wholegrain reflect the sort of changes that would help. 

For instance, plant based meals reduce the environmental footprint of food production. Wholegrain has a vegan and vegetarian meals policy in line with this. It doesn’t mean meals are boring though. Our Christmas dinner at Mallow could be described in many ways;   sustainable, innovative, delicious, but definitely not boring. 

Prioritising low carbon transport over air travel is another thing advocated for by climate scientists. This does require a shift in mindset but the results can be amazing. Our no flight policy can mean a bit of additional planning. But the combination of lower emissions and more adventure makes for the best stories. Just ask our founders Tom & Vineeta and our Technical Delivery Lead Tommy.

Diet and travel are two areas where personal tastes and habits can support can aid systematic transformation. In reality we’re in a polycrisis and change is required across all aspects of daily life. The truth is that the climate crisis won’t be solved by any single action or group of people. We need actions on policy and governmental levels to help organisations and individuals to transition to a lower carbon, less environmentally destructive way of life.

We urgently need that change to come. Our client Carbon Brief‘s daily email briefings offer insights into the risks we face. A recent email shared a report that Europe recorded over 10,000 excess deaths in the heatwaves in late June.

It’s scary to think that this is likely to become the new normal. 

In this context, it’s important to remember that there is hope.  

There are organisations out there fighting on our behalf and advocating for the change we need. When I chatted to colleagues for our last article, the work our clients are doing came up a lot. When you read about their work, it paints a more hopeful and optimistic light.

I’d like to share some of that optimism with you now. 

In this (non-exhaustive) article, I’ll show you how some of our clients are advocating for governmental policy change, enabling habitat restoration, improving our built environment, and accelerating the transition to renewable energy. 

The Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment – Shaping Policy Change

Climate change requires top down, systemic change. Joined up, long term, resilient climate policies need expert advice, analysis and research. This is something that our client, Grantham, knows all about. The institute is hosted by the Global School of Sustainability at the London School of Economics. They enable “a sustainable, inclusive and resilient world, pursued through research, policy analysis and training on climate change and the environment”. 

How they help –  Framework to policy Adaptation Investment Framework. 

It’s clear that the UK, along with the rest of the world, has to work to adapt to climate change. Part of the challenge is bridging the gap between these adaptation requirements and the finance required. Grantham is working with DEFRA to develop a new Adaptation Investment Framework (AIF) to meet this challenge. The framework provides a toolkit for the Government, real economy actors and financial institutions to mobilise the required investment, fast and at scale.

How Wholegrain supports Grantham’s mission

We launched Grantham’s current site in 2020 and have been collaborating with them ever since. The site looks as clean and modern today as it did on launch day, something that is a testament to the brief they provided and the work done by the project team. Like the policies they institute, advocates for the site are robust, future proofed and low carbon. 

Since the launch, we’ve worked to ensure the site maintains its high levels of performance, usability and accessibility. Optimising on site search and improved article filtering have been key to this. 

Find out more about the work with Grantham here.

Good Energy – Transitioning the UK to renewable energy

The first message you see when visiting Good Energy’s site is “THE WORLD NEEDS MORE GOOD ENERGY”. The energy in question is 100% British-made renewable electricity from independent producers. In a warming world, where burning fossil fuels is exacerbating the heatwaves, this type of “Good Energy” is exactly what we need more of. 

Good Energy is a sustainable alternative who delivers higher standards than their less sustainable competitors. High levels of customer satisfaction and service led to multiple awards from Which? Did we mention that they’re also BCorp certified? 

Basically, they are just really good at what they do. The fact that what they’re doing helps the UK to transition away from fossil fuels is a lovely bonus. 

How they help – Switching tool & Energy Market Reform report 

Aside from their service, they help individuals and organisations in other ways. Their switching tools are a simple way for prospective customers to move to renewables (individuals & businesses). But Good Energy can help businesses go a step further. Their solar installation service is perfect for businesses that want to cut energy costs and increase resilience. 

Like Grantham, they also use their expertise to influence policy. Their latest report on energy market reform is a great example. It argues that the only way the Government can ensure long term price stability for the UK is to move away from gas generation to a renewable energy mix.

How Wholegrain support Good Energy’s mission 

We designed and launched Good Energy’s site in 2021 and have been with them every step of the way since. Our bold design supports the story telling elements of the site. We’ve been on hand to evolve user experience tweaks and add new features as Good Energy grows. User journeys are continually smoothed and optimised ensuring that switching to a renewable tariff is a breeze. 

Find out more about the work with do with Good Energy here. 

UK Green Building Council (UKGBC) – Making the UK’s build environment more resilient and fit for purpose 

The recent heatwaves highlighted how the UK’s buildings and housing stock are inadequate for a warming planet. Renters, homeowners and businesses struggled to keep their buildings cool enough to live and work. It’s clear that something needs to change. 

Enter the UKGBC.

How they help –  UK Climate Resilience Roadmap and other resources. 

The UKGBC is on a mission to radically improve the sustainability of the built environment in the UK. They want to transform how buildings are planned, financed, designed, constructed, maintained, operated and repurposed.  Their 2030 roadmap sets out four key strategic goals:

1. A Shared Sustainability Vision – Foster collaboration and consensus across the sector
2. Moving from Intent to Action – Accelerate industry-wide action  toward sustainability                                      
3. Influencing Policy and Advocacy – Influence progressive policy  frameworks and business models                                       
4. Building Capacity and Leadership – Build skills and leadership for systemic change

2030 is not far away, but the UKGBC believes that we need to act immediately. “The UK’s built environment is facing an urgent reality: climate hazards are no longer future threats but immediate dangers”. 

Their recent UK Climate Resilience Roadmap sets out a vision for a climate resilient built environment, sharing clear recommendations for the industry and policy, and next steps needed to increase the climate resilience of our built environment. It identifies 5 major climate hazards threatening the UK and uses evidence to argue that “acting now is the only responsible choice”.

The report offers evidence backed methods to meet the challenges the UK faces as well as the policy changes required to make them a reality.  

How Wholegrain support UKGBCs mission 

In 2023, we helped UKGBC align their ambitions for the physical environment with their digital presence. Their site is one of the most innovative we’ve ever built, with the team at UKGBC wholeheartedly buying into our vision. Since launch, we’ve worked closely with their team to elevate their new initiatives digitally and optimise engagement.

Their appetite for digital innovation remains high. One of our most recent projects for them involved adding an AI chatbot to help surface more information and ensure that their wide range of resources are as discoverable as possible. 

You can read more about the project and how we support UKGBC here.

Environment Bank – Restoring nature and improving biodiversity

If you spend as much time reading sustainability news sites as I do, you might be aware that carbon capture schemes have been in the news recently. Microsoft has just slashed its investments in the technology. Questions remain about its efficacy and scalability.

Thankfully, nature has some pretty effective methods of carbon sequestration with habitat restoration playing a key part of this. We are lucky to support the Environment Bank, one of the best organisations in the field.  

How they help – Creating biodiversity gains

Environment Bank is the nation’s leading biodiversity gains specialist, restoring habitats across England. They work to create Habitat Banks, taking parcels of low-quality, often monocultural land and transforming them into thriving biospheres perfect for native flora and fauna. 

These Habitat Banks allow developers to meet their Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) requirements for new builds and renovation projects. To meet planning conditions, developers must demonstrate that they will improve biodiversity as part of the project. Where it is not possible to offer a net gain of biodiversity on site, such as this project in Rochdale. Environment Bank allows developers to find tailored solutions and meet their BNG requirements.

How Wholegrain contributes to Environment Banks’ mission 

The concept of BNGs is not the easiest to clearly communicate (though I hope I have done it justice above!). Environment Bank needed a website that clearly explained their market leading projects to multiple audiences. They needed to showcase the value of their Habitat Banks and do justice to their award winning brand. We worked with them in 2025 to build a site that does just that. 

With a diverse audience and differing user journeys to consider, our discovery process laid the foundations for a successful project. Our work to understand the site audiences, coupled with some creative, sustainable web design and bespoke features such as an interactive map creates a site the team can be proud of. 

You can find out more about the work with do with Environment Bank here. 

What cause can we help you further?

Wholegrain offer a range of digital services to help you and your organisation combat the climate crisis as sustainably as we know how. From maintenance contracts to full site builds and digital sustainable transformation consultancy, we’re here to help.

Contact Bailey to find out how.

I don’t know about you, but I found June’s heatwave pretty scary. It felt relentless and sapping and troubling. All across the UK, we saw records for high day time and night time temperatures tumble as things heated up.

The average temperature in my village in France was around 36 degrees at 650m above sea level. We haven’t had the worst of it here, with much of central France suffering record breaking temperatures above 40 degrees for multiple days. The heatwave continues to spread across Europe as I write.  

The often unspoken truth is that climate change made the heat more intense. 

In this report from Carbon Brief they lay things bare. “Climate change is unequivocally to blame”, noting that the scorching temperatures would have been “virtually impossible” 50 years ago. This wasn’t 1976, it was hotter and more widespread. 

These record temperatures have tangible real world impacts. 2000 deaths have been attributed to the heatwave in France and Spain.The UK suffered travel issues, hospitals were overwhelmed by increased demand and critical hospital infrastructure struggled to cope. 

Travel disruption and iced treats

As the heat abated, conversations turned away from frozen snacks to more important things. This article was meant to be a round up of the LCAW events that our team attended, and our clients were involved in. 

The heatwave changed all that.

During discussions this week, the topic shifted to how people and companies might take action in the wake of the heatwave. It’s important to remember that this wasn’t just another hot few days. More episodes like this are likely to come. How can we use our agency to take meaningful action? 

Taking action

Our first suggestion is to attend a screening of the National Emergency Briefing on Climate as a number of our team have. The film is a powerful reminder of the challenges we face but also that action is possible. Not only do the solutions to the climate crisis already exist, but they need implementation.  

You can find public screenings in the UK here. 

For workplace screenings, Business Declares can help facilitate these events. Contact samantha@businessdeclares.com to discuss. 

As well as a workplace screening, there are a number of other actions businesses can take. 

Becoming a business member of Business Declares is a great place to start. Alternatively your organisation could throw its support behind the BCorp Better Business Act, a campaign to amend the Companies Act. The campaign asks the government to amend Section 172 of the Companies Act to legally empower UK businesses to balance the long-term interests of people, planet, and profit. Signing up to support the campaign triggers a letter to be sent to your local MP  

If you work in the creative sector, you could join Wholegrain and thousands of organisations and individuals in taking the Clean Creatives pledge. Climate change is scientifically proven to be caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Fossil fuel companies have long known of the risks their operations pose. Despite this, they have lobbied hard to hide this knowledge and delay action. 

Pledging not to work for the fossil fuel industry helps the world take a step towards de-carbonisation. 

If you work in the digital sector, you can support this move in another way. The Green Web Foundation is campaigning for the decarbonisation of the internet. Their Fossil Free Internet report on Data Centers is eye opening and shocking. Thankfully it offers three solution pathways to improve things and support the other initiatives listed in this article.

Start small, think big

Whatever you do, the important thing is that you can do something. Small steps can quickly add up to become major changes. At Wholegrain we’ve been working towards a more sustainable digital industry for over a decade. It’s never felt more important than it does now. 

If you’re feeling inspired, keep an eye out for our next blog. We will cover some of the amazing work that our clients do and how you can get involved. 

Today’s post is a collaboration between myself, Tom Greenwood, and Michael Andersen, a fellow digital sustainability advocate and author of the book Sustainable Web Design in 20 Lessons.

Michael got in touch with me recently with a rather interesting question — if people are increasingly getting their information directly from AI services like ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, should we still be designing websites for humans? Put another way, is the primary audience for a website in the future going to be non-human intelligence?

This is a rather provocative question, and as Michael and I both care deeply about the environmental and social impact of the web, it is one that we should not ignore.

Of course, the idea that we might have to consider robots when designing a website is not entirely new. There has long been a tension between the need (and desire) to provide the best experience to human users while also needing to optimise websites for higher search rankings. The robots have been exerting power over us for a long time already. However, until recently the robots were simply the gatekeepers controlling who actually finds their way into our websites. With the rise of AI services, the robots are stealing our content and locking the gates behind them. 

This poses some interesting challenges for any person or organisation that has a website, and in the process forces us to ask some deeper questions about what we actually want the Internet to be moving forward. It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that this is an inherently bad thing, and it’s certainly not all good, but Michael and I want to hold space to consider the challenges alongside the possibilities with open minds, to imagine how we might evolve the web positively for this new era.

The AI traffic paradox

In recent times we’ve seen a number of clients at Wholegrain Digital experience significant spikes in their web hosting traffic as a result of AI bots constantly crawling their pages for information. This can come at a real financial cost to the client, not to mention the environmental impact, and it raises the question over whether we should block AI bots from our websites.

At the same time though, Michael highlights that some organisations have seen significant drops in web traffic coinciding with the rising popularity of AI services such as ChatGPT. At Wholegrain we have seen ChatGPT appear as a new traffic source for some websites, but at this stage it’s mostly a small one, as fewer people tend to click back to websites from their AI answers compared to traditional search engine results. Not to mention the fact that Google now provides AI answers at the top of its search results these days, reducing the need for the website “visitor” to um… visit. 

So we have AI companies causing a significant increase in artificial traffic to websites, while also reducing the human traffic to those same websites. And yet the place where these AI tools get their information from are these very same websites. Websites that people have invested a lot of time and money into designing, building, and maintaining, as well as creating content for.

This article isn’t about arguing the injustice of this situation, but to sit with it and acknowledge that we are in something of a paradox. AI services need a thriving Internet full of rich information in order to do what they do, yet they simultaneously erode the incentive for people and organisations to invest in creating a thriving web. The snake is eating its own tail.

Visiting the source

In our discussions, Michael highlighted a key feature of this changing dynamic being that websites are increasingly treated as sources of information, rather than destinations to visit. If AI companies have their way, much like social media, people will spend most of their time on these new platforms and not leave. In this sense they really don’t care about your website other than it being a source of data to mine. 

But it’s likely that if you have a website, then you do care that people visit. You likely have reasons, whether commercial or not, to want real human beings to visit your website. You could, as some are doing, block AI crawlers from your website to discourage them from mining your website and attempt to ensure that the information on your website is really only available by visiting your website. This may work for some, but as people increasingly use AI tools as search engines, blocking AI crawlers entirely is not dissimilar to blocking Google from your website. It’s a bold and admirable ethical stance, but it might not be very practical in many cases. So what can we do instead?

My personal view is that we may need to design hybrid websites, facing the tension head on by separating the needs of humans from the “needs” of robots, but neglecting neither. We can compartmentalise, at least partially, the destination for humans, and the source of data for machines. In doing so, we might actually create a win-win and unleash a new wave of human creativity in web design, reversing the long term trend of websites “all looking the same.” Let me explain.

The human experience

One of the things that this new dynamic highlights is that some people go online in search of answers to questions, and LLMs are increasingly taking this role. However, the user experience of LLMs tends to come in the form of long text based responses, or a digital voice speaking these same answers. What they don’t provide is the rich, immersive experience that has for a long time been a significant part of what people enjoy about going online. It could be argued that in the past decade or so, as User Experience “best practices” have become more firmly established and websites have been optimised for search rankings, the web has become increasingly bland compared to its earlier days when website design was a truly creative practice.

We now have an opportunity to reverse that trend by prioritising the human visitor not just in terms of ease of use, but in terms of the richness of experience that we offer people. Websites that are truly beautiful, immersive, joyful and thought provoking in their design, and which people want to visit because they are places that people actually want to be rather than just sources of dry information.

This also includes the tone of voice of the content, which is generally very bland in LLM tools but can be much more expressive on your own website, especially if there is now less need to awkwardly jam our content full of SEO keywords. This will allow us to enrich people’s experiences and convey the spirit of our brands in ways that an LLM likely won’t, making our own websites a more authentic expression of what we really have to say.

We could compare this to the shift we are seeing in high streets, whereby generic, uninspiring shops have struggled to compete with online retailers, but it has left an unmet need for unique, enjoyable experiences that people cannot get from shopping on Amazon. When high street retailers shift their perspective to see themselves as destinations to be experienced rather than just places to buy things, people do make the effort to leave their homes and go into town. Similarly, when we view websites this way and design experiences that people genuinely enjoy visiting and even want to share with their friends, we create something that the LLMs cannot replicate, even if they steal some of our content.

Of course, my comparison with high streets runs out here as some of the organisations that have the greatest opportunity to do this are likely those with some element of e-commerce. There is an inherent opportunity to inspire potential customers with rich visual information about the products, and interactive tools to help them understand products better and choose what is right for them. Of course we want to do this in a way that is accessible and environmentally efficient, but there are huge opportunities here for creativity. To quote my colleague Chânelle Sharp, a designer at Wholegrain, “the design of websites will shift to work even harder for the user now”. I think that is a good thing, with web design in the near future becoming much more about digital storytelling.

People are time poor and so instead of wasting their time with large reams of text intended mostly for Google, user experiences could actually cut back significantly on written text in many cases and just give people exactly the information they need, in a beautiful and engaging format. And despite the downsides of these AI tools, it may just be that AI coding tools in the long term will make it easier for organisations to create rich functionality and design features such as visualisations, personalisations, dashboard, calculators, and interactive journeys, that were previously beyond their budgets. It may well be therefore that AI coding will gradually reduce one of the key limiting factors in doing really exciting things online.

Then come the robots

If we design websites primarily for humans once more and relegate the AI and search crawlers to second class citizens of the web, then you may be wondering, how do you get your website featured in search results and AI responses? I think the answer might be to have a secondary layer of a website that is purely informational, with large repositories of high quality written information and raw data relating to your organisation and area of expertise. These repositories can include high quality original data, white papers, academic research and the like, making them a rich source of quotable information for the LLMs. These pages can be crawled by crawlers without getting in the way of human visitors, and to quote Chânelle again, “if the information is purely informational, then maybe it doesn’t even need to be designed”. This second layer of a website could be super efficient by virtue of not being mixed in with the presentation elements such as imagery and custom fonts that are there only to improve the experience of humans.

But what if your visitors do want to access some of this information from your data repository while they are on your website? This is where a more efficient LLM tool tailored just to your website may provide the answer. Tools such as HOLP, which we used for the UK Green Building Council, can provide answers to the questions of the people who have arrived at your website, without them having to leave your website and unlike mass market AI tools, they can provide trusted answers as they are trained to provide information from your own websites information repository (as well as its user facing web content). This is a win for the human visitor who is seeking specific information that may not be easy to find in the standard user facing content, and for the organisation who is able to meet the unique needs of such visitors without complicating the user experience for other people.

I’ll hand over to Michael now to discuss how some of this might be achieved on a practical level.

Down at street level

I want to begin by saying how excited I have been to write this alongside Tom. Ever since I first read his book Sustainable Web Design, he has been a constant source of inspiration to me. The hybrid idea he lands on, a light and human surface sitting on top of a denser layer meant for machines, is the thread I want to follow, though I would not want to give either of us too much credit for it, since the web has been built in roughly this shape for a long time and most of us have simply taken it for granted. What feels worth examining now is not the layers themselves, but the question of who that hidden layer is increasingly being built for, and that is where my own corner of the work comes in.

That corner is the code itself, where I tend to sit rather than up above it looking at the strategy. Tom has been describing the shape of all this from above, the way you might look down at a city and see how the roads connect to one another, and I want to stay down at street level for the rest of this, because it is down there that the same question we kept circling stops being philosophical and turns into something you can put your hands on. It becomes a question about which file you create, and what you put in it, and who you imagine reading it. So where Tom has been holding the why of all this, I want to spend my half on the how, on what the hybrid he describes actually looks like when you are the one who has to build it.

The plumbing underneath the page

If you have ever sat and built a website properly, not just made it look nice but actually built it so that it holds together, then you already know that a page is never only the thing the visitor sees. Underneath the colours and the images and the words arranged on the screen, there is a second version of the same page that almost no human ever really looks at. There is structured data, little labelled notes in the markup that say this is the price, this is the author, this is the date, this is the review, and here is how many stars it got. There is JSON sitting in the background, describing the page in a way that is clean and predictable and easy for software to read. And none of this is particularly new to anyone who builds for the web, because we have been doing it for years, mostly so that search engines could understand our pages well enough to rank them, and most visitors have never had any idea it was there.

To make that a little less abstract, it helps to picture what one of those hidden notes actually looks like in practice. If I have written an article, I might tuck a small block of structured data into the page, written in a format called JSON-LD, which is really just a tidy way of listing plain facts so that a machine can read them without having to guess. In ordinary words, the block says something like, this thing is an article, its headline is this, the person who wrote it is this, it was published on this date, and it belongs to this larger publication. None of that changes a single pixel of what you see on the screen, and you could read the article perfectly well without ever knowing the block was there. But a machine that lands on the page no longer has to work out who the author is by hunting around the layout and hoping it has guessed correctly, because you have simply told it, in a vocabulary that thousands of other sites use in exactly the same way. That shared vocabulary is what people mean when they talk about schema, and the whole point of it is that meaning stops being something a machine has to reconstruct and becomes something you have stated plainly.

What is changing now is the kind of reader that layer is starting to serve. There is a proposed convention that appeared back in 2024, suggested by Jeremy Howard, who is one of the people behind Answer.AI, and it is called llms.txt. The idea is almost touchingly simple. You place a plain markdown file at the root of your website, the same way we have placed a robots.txt file there for decades, and in it you lay out, in clean and readable text, the parts of your site you actually want a language model to read. No clutter, no menus, no scripts, no advertising, just the meaning, served plainly.

And because it is only markdown, building one is genuinely something you could finish in an afternoon, which is part of why it interests me so much. You open a plain text file, you name it llms.txt, and you place it at the very root of your site so that it sits at a predictable address the way robots.txt always has. At the top you write the name of the site and a sentence or two describing what it is and who it is for. Then you write a short list of links to the pages that actually matter, your best writing, your core explanations, your reference material, and after each link you add a handful of words saying what a reader will find there. That is more or less the whole thing. If you want to go a step further there is a fuller version, often kept as a second file, where instead of only pointing at your important pages you include the full cleaned up text of them, so that a model has the real content in front of it rather than just a map showing where the content lives. Either way, what you are really doing is curating. You are deciding, on purpose and in advance, what you would want a machine to understand about your work if it only ever saw the tidy version and never visited the site at all.

I want to be honest about what it is and what it is not, because it would be easy to oversell it. It is not an official standard, and Howard himself has said as much. The big AI systems do not reliably read it yet, and by now more than one fairly large study has looked at the question and found that adding the file does not measurably change how often a model mentions you, with one analysis of around three hundred thousand sites finding essentially no difference at all. Google has even said, fairly plainly, that it has no plans to support it. And yet hundreds of thousands of sites have already added one, including a few names you would recognise, and people who have watched the web for a long time keep comparing it to the early days of schema markup, back when that too looked like a niche curiosity that later turned out to matter a great deal.

And this is where I want to put the practical heart of it, because it would be easy to read everything above and imagine that building Tom’s hybrid means building two entire websites, one warm and human and one stripped bare for the machines, two of everything and twice the work. You can do that, and for certain things you genuinely should, but for most of a site the truth turned out to be stranger and a good deal kinder than that. If you have already built the human layer properly, with markup that is clean and honest about what each thing is, with real headings and real buttons and images that are actually described, then you have already built most of the machine layer without ever thinking of it that way. What you add on top of that is thin. A little structured data to state plainly what the important things on the page are, and an llms.txt file at the root to hand a model the tidy version of what you most want it to read. That is the bulk of the work, and almost none of it is a second website. It is mostly just the first website.

Where the two layers do genuinely come apart is in the place Tom pointed to, the large stores of pure information, the white papers and the raw data and the long reference material that exist mainly to be read rather than to be experienced. For that kind of thing it really does make sense to build a separate and lighter layer, plain pages or plain markdown with almost no presentation wrapped around them, so that a crawler can read them cheaply and a person who actually wants the underlying detail can still reach it without having to wade through it on the main site. So when I try to picture the hybrid in concrete terms, it is not two parallel websites standing side by side at all. It is one human site built well enough that it serves the machines almost for free, sitting next to a small and efficient archive for the heavy reference material that nobody really wanted dressed up in the first place.

And this is the moment I really wanted to reach, because when you sit with all of this at once, you start to notice something a little strange, and a little hard to name. The future Tom was describing, the website that is one thing for people and another thing for machines, is in some sense already half built. We just never called it that. We built the human layer because we cared about people, and we built the machine layer because we wanted to be found, and now that machine layer is slowly turning into the thing that reads our work on the reader’s behalf. It is a bit like discovering that a path you have been clearing and maintaining for years leads somewhere you never expected it to go.

When accessibility starts serving the machine

There is one corner of all this that I have not been able to stop thinking about since my call with Tom, and it has to do with accessibility. For most of my career, the work of making a website accessible has been understood as work we do for people. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which most of us just call WCAG and which are looked after by the people at the W3C, exist so that someone who cannot see the screen, or cannot use a mouse, or who processes information differently, can still move through a website and understand it. In practice, when we talk about meeting those guidelines, we usually mean building to a level they call AA, which most teams treat as the realistic target, and the work of getting there is made up of a hundred small and very ordinary decisions. You write alternative text that genuinely describes what an image shows rather than leaving it empty. You use headings in a real order instead of choosing them for how big they happen to look on the screen.

You label the fields in a form so that it is clear what each one is asking for. You make sure every part of the page can be reached and operated with a keyboard alone, and that the text has enough contrast against its background to be read by someone whose eyes are tired or beginning to fail. None of it is glamorous, and almost none of it ever shows up in a screenshot, but it is the difference between a site a person can actually use and one that closes its door to them. Here in Europe that work has recently stopped being optional in a lot of cases, because the European Accessibility Act came into force in the summer of 2025 and now expects a great many digital products and services to meet exactly these guidelines. So accessibility has been on a lot of minds lately, and rightly so.

But here is the part that feels strange to me. The whole craft of accessibility has always been, underneath everything else, the craft of making meaning explicit. You write your markup so that a screen reader, which is itself a machine, can correctly understand what is a heading and what is a button and what an image is actually showing. You describe things in plain words so that software can relay them faithfully to a person who needs them in some other form. In other words, we have spent years and years learning to make our websites legible to a machine, because a machine was the thing standing between our content and the human who needed it. We just thought of that machine as an assistant working on behalf of a person, which it was.

And once you see it laid out like that, the overlap with everything I was describing earlier stops feeling like a coincidence and starts to look almost like the same task wearing two different faces. The alternative text you wrote for a blind visitor is meaning made explicit, and a language model wants that exact thing. The heading you marked up honestly so that a screen reader could announce it is structure made explicit, and a model trying to make sense of your page wants that too. The form field you labelled, the button you named properly, the landmark you added so that someone could skip straight to the main content, every one of those is intent stated plainly rather than left to be guessed, and plainly stated intent is precisely what this new reader is hungry for. Which means that in very practical terms, if you build a site to that AA level for the people who actually need it, you have quietly built a large part of your machine layer at the very same time, and the two reasons for doing the work, the human one and the technical one, turn out to be pointing in the same direction.

Now another kind of machine is arriving, the language model, and it turns out that much of the work we did to make the web kinder to people has also, almost by accident, made it more readable to this new reader. The structure, the explicit labels, the meaning made plain, all of the things we built for the person using assistive technology turn out to be more or less exactly the things a language model also wants. I find that both hopeful and slightly unsettling, and I do not think I am supposed to resolve which one it is. It is hopeful because it might mean that good, accessible, carefully made websites are simply ready for this new era without anyone having to compromise anything. And it is unsettling because there is something odd about realising that work you did for the most human of reasons also serves something that is not human at all.

And then it opens a question I genuinely do not know the answer to. If a language model can read the raw, structured meaning of a page and then reshape it into whatever form a particular person needs, spoken aloud, simplified, translated, slowed down, made calmer, then it is at least possible that AI becomes a better companion for people with accessibility needs than many of the tools we have today. The same shift could even help companies that have never been able to afford a genuinely good, accessible experience, because the model sitting in front of their content could, in principle, give their visitors a kinder journey than their own budget ever allowed. I want to hold that possibility gently rather than promise it, because we have all heard a great many promises about what AI is supposedly going to fix. But I would be lying if I said the thought did not move me a little, that the very thing reshaping the web might also, if we are careful and a bit lucky, make it gentler toward the people it has so often left behind.

AI as a search tool

I want to slow down here, because there is a worry underneath all of this that I have been turning over for a long while, and I am wary of how I say it, because it would be very easy to make it sound like I am complaining about the way people read now, and that is not what I mean at all.

At my job we have spent time talking with young people about how they find things out, and one of those conversations has stayed with me. A teenager said, more or less, that AI made the person lazy, that when something can simply be handed to the person, the person loses the urge to go and chase the answer. I want to be careful and call this what it honestly is, which is one young person being candid in one conversation, not a study and not a verdict. But it landed on something I had been feeling for a while without quite having the words for it. Because if the answer can be had instantly, without arriving anywhere at all, then a certain kind of journey simply stops happening. Not the journey through a checkout or a menu, but the one where you go looking for something, and you end up somewhere you did not plan to be, and you leave a little changed by having been there.

For a long time I think we treated that journey as part of the value of the web, even though we never wrote it down anywhere or put it in a proposal to a client. You arrived at a site, you read more than you came for, you understood the people behind it, you caught their tone of voice, you felt that there was a person or a team or a belief on the other side of the screen. That was never really about the information. The information was almost the excuse for the visit. And my worry is not that people have become lazy, but that we are building a version of the web where that kind of arrival is no longer necessary, at least for everything that can be reduced to a quick answer. I do not think that is the whole web, and I do not think it has to be a tragedy. But I think it is worth noticing what we might be letting go of while we are busy admiring everything we are gaining.

And I notice, sitting here at the practical end of all this, that my worry is really the shadow of Tom’s hope. He is hopeful that we will build places worth coming to, websites so rich and so genuinely worth the visit that people choose to arrive even when a machine could have spared them the trip. I share that hope, more than I probably let on. But the thing I keep turning over, down here where the pages actually get made, is whether the arriving itself is quietly being designed out of the web, and whether all the craft in the world can pull someone back to a place they no longer have any reason to go.

The questions I cannot put down

So I find myself ending more or less where Tom began, holding a handful of questions rather than answers, which I have come to think is the honest place to stand.

Are we still designing for people, or are we slowly becoming translators, standing in between humans and machines, trying to serve both at once without fully belonging to either? When a language model has already read everything on the page before the person ever arrives, what is the visit itself actually for, and what is left inside it that still matters? And if the model becomes the thing that shapes how our work is understood, I find myself wondering whether it might end up building better journeys through that work than we do, and whether, a little further down the same road, we will still need the style guides and the UX designers and the graphic content, or whether those become a luxury rather than a default.

I wonder too about the places that exist almost entirely to be read; the Wikipedias and the reference sites and the great open stores of knowledge, and whether they will one day be built in a wholly different way, written first as plain markdown for the machines rather than dressed up in markup for us.

I am not sure either, when it really comes to it, whether companies will simply hand the whole customer journey over to the AI sitting in front of their content, having decided that a more accessible and more helpful experience, delivered by a machine, is worth more to them than the elaborate one they once paid so much to design. And if plain text is becoming the shared layer that the machines hand out for free to anyone who asks, then what becomes the thing worth keeping precious, the thing we still make slowly and by hand precisely because it cannot simply be read out by something else and passed along? I do not have clean answers to any of these, and I am not sure I trust anyone who says they do.

What I do know is that the question Tom opened with, whether we are still designing for humans, is not really a question with a yes or a no waiting at the end of it. It is more like a question we are going to be living inside of for the next several years, whether we choose to or not.

This week I had the pleasure of giving a talk at Smashing’s “Meets Sustainability” event, alongside fellow speakers Chris Adams and Ines Akrap. Videos of all talks and the Q&A are available to watch online, but in this article, I want to provide a written version of my talk, One Small Step for Web Kind.

My hope for this article is to communicate the key message of my talk, which is this:

The title of my talk echoes Neil Armstrong’s famous words when stepping onto the surface of the moon, and it felt fitting for a talk given at a time when the scale of the digital sustainability problem has apparently transcended Earth. With Elon Musk talking about putting data centers in space, and even on the moon itself.

It would be easy to throw our hands in the air and say “I give up,” but I hope to inspire you to believe that our hope and actions matter now more than ever. To explain why, let me travel back in time to the beginning of my own journey in web sustainability.

From small beginnings

When I started Wholegrain with my wife Vineeta in 2007, we had a mission to use our business for good and we put sustainability at the heart of everything that we did, from the way that we worked, to the supplies that we purchased, to how we traveled, and to the types of clients that we worked with, but despite our best intentions, that wasn’t actually everything.

It was only in 2016 when we were preparing to certify as a B Corp that I realised that we had a huge blind spot. The B Corp assessment asked us how we measure the environmental impact of the products that we make, and furthermore, how we reduce that impact. Having previously specialised in the eco-design of physical products, I knew exactly what this question meant, as I had done exactly this type of assessment and design in the past, but I had always assumed that digital products didn’t have an environmental impact. They were “virtual” and living in a “cloud.” Weren’t they?

When I read these questions in the B Corp assessment, it quickly dawned on me how ignorant I had been, and to be honest, I was really embarrassed. Of all people, I had the experience to know better.

This realisation kick-started a mission that has since been at the center of Wholegrain, to understand the impact of the web, and to figure out what we can do about it. At that early time, searching online, the number of people who I found talking about this topic could be counted on one hand, such as Tim Frick, Mike Gifford, and James Christie. True pioneers out there in the wilderness.

I also found a lone academic paper on the subject, reporting the total emissions of the internet to be 2% of all global emissions, equivalent to the aviation industry. This was a startling statistic. There was very little information, and very few people talking about it, but it was a start, and it inspired me to go further.

That starting point led me to develop the first methodology for calculating the emissions of a single website, so that we could benchmark our work and find ways to improve. It led our team to then look at their own work in a new light and begin to evolve their approaches to design, development, content, and hosting, and we began to share what we were learning through talks, tools like WebsiteCarbon.com, collaborations like the Sustainable Web Manifesto, and content such as blog posts, our Curiously Green newsletter, and in 2021 my first book, Sustainable Web Design.

At first, most people were skeptical, believing that the digital world doesn’t impact the physical world. But slowly, slowly, people began to engage with the topic. And those people who engaged with the topic went on to make changes in their own work, speak to their colleagues, write their own articles, give talks, develop new tools, and even write books.

Skip forward to today and while the AI race may have made some people feel that the digital sustainability challenge is now too big to solve, we should stop and look at how far we have come. In an industry that claims to be forward thinking, digital sustainability was not on the agenda 10 years ago, apart from those few pioneers speaking into the seemingly endless void. Now, in 2026 there is a significant level of awareness of the impacts of digital technology, not just in the industry, but even in the general public. There are a growing number of events, podcasts, blogs, and tools, not to mention that a global standard for web sustainability is well on its way to fruition thanks to this ever-growing community of passionate people. On top of that, every day that I log into LinkedIn, I see someone with “digital sustainability” or “sustainable web design” in their profile or their company description. The culture has changed radically in 10 years, and this is thanks to every single person who stopped to take notice and cared enough to do something, however small.

It all matters, and every small action does matter, however imperfect it might be. If you optimise your email newsletter or switch to EcoSend, that one action scales to thousands of emails every time you send a message. If you optimise your website, that impact scales over thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of visitors, and if you slow down your use of AI, you slow down the AI race just a little bit. Furthermore, when we talk about the things that matter, sharing knowledge and ideas, we multiply our impact further, having a ripple effect that extends out to horizons that we will never see, but will likely be greater than the direct impact that we can see.

Seth Godin says that culture is simply the phenomenon that “people like us do things like this,” and I believe that in this spirit we can change the culture simply by daring to do things differently in line with our own values. We may face resistance at first, but gradually we disrupt the flow of the status quo to the point that the culture in our teams, in our organisations, in our industries, and society at large, begins to change.

My friend Nick Whitnell often likes to quote Buckminster Fuller, who loved to illustrate this with the analogy of a ship. Huge ships have immense momentum and are almost impossible to turn. The forces resisting them from turning are so great that it’s almost impossible to even turn the rudder, let alone the ship itself. To overcome this problem, ships have a tiny extra rudder attached to their main rudder, called a trim tab. This trim tab is small enough that it can be moved in the water, and when it does so, it creates a small pocket of low pressure that slowly moves the big rudder. And as the big rudder then moves, gradually the whole ship changes direction.

We may feel small and insignificant, but we are all the trim tabs of our society, quietly creating pressure to turn the seemingly unstoppable ship that we are all on, if we choose to. We just need to dare to stick our little oar out into the oncoming flow of water and trust that in time we are helping to steer the ship.

So with that, I hope that I’ve inspired you to believe that we all do matter, that the future hasn’t been written yet, and that we should get up each day and do our best to represent a version of the world that we want to live in, knowing that how we show up today shapes the world that we step into tomorrow.

10 years of BCorp UK – 10! 

In some ways 2015 feels like forever ago but also, yesterday. To get us in the mindset of 2015 – think rose gold everything, selfie sticks being a constant hazard, the word Brexit wasn’t in our lexicon and Adele dropped “Hello” (living rent free in our minds ever since!).

While 10 years seems like a lifetime, it’s hard to remember a time when we weren’t a BCorp. The ethos behind the movement has always been at the core of what we do. Our founders’ original vision in 2007 was to create a better web for a better future. Ethical screening has been part of our business since 2009. What B Lab UK did is solidify that we are not alone in conducting our business with purpose. It pulled like-minded organisations together, creating community and fostering positive growth. Most importantly it created frameworks for others who didn’t know where to start.

Having certified in 2017, we have grown up alongside B Lab UK with many fun collaborations! The B Impact Assessment was a catalyst for our growth and gave us something to continually hold ourselves accountable too.

Let’s Take 10 to reflect on where we started and what we’re fired up about for the future!

• In 2015 we introduced a no-fly policy.
• In 2017, we were part of the 2nd cohorts of BCorp in the UK and launched the first version of the Website Carbon Calculator.
• Joined 1% for the Planet in 2018 to date, supporting organisations like International Rivers, B Lab UK, Business Declares, The Green Web Foundation, Eden Project, Surfers Against Sewage, Solar Aid, Catalyse Change, Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust, COAST, and Re-Action Collective.
• We released the Sustainable Web Manifesto and co-created the Sustainable Web Design Guidelines with MightyBytes.
• In 2021, we worked with B Lab UK to build the Better Business Act website.
• We only went and won a B Corp Best For The World accolade for Governance in 2022.
• A true mark of growing up – in 2023 Tom & Vineeta graduated to Founders roles and brought in a Senior Leadership team that not only maintains Wholegrain’s values but builds on them.
• We attended the largest gathering of BCorps in Oxford September 2024, a monumental moment packing out the whole city for 2 days!
• 2024 was a big year! Employee-led benefits were introduced and we took ethical screening to the next level by becoming Clean Creatives.
• Finally in 2025, we launched the 4th version of Website Carbon Calculator! 

We’re very proud of the past, but honestly, reflecting on the last 10 years did fire us up for the future! Particularly for:

• Seeing the Better Business Act become a legal requirement in the UK with an amended Section 172 of the Companies Act. You can pledge your business today on their website (designed & developed by us!).
• Evolving people’s knowledge of digital sustainability from benchmarking to Human Web Principles. In a world where we can generate anything, how can we take a step back to create self-paced online experiences that are adaptable? We do have more on this to share with you..
• Our team! With the introduction of non-bias recruitment, strong flexible working policies and employee led benefits – we are seeing incredible talent enquire to be part of our team. They aren’t hindered by location or stuffy CVs, we are prioritising the human behind the talent so they feel supported to do their best work possible.

This is our impact but there are over 2,600+ other BCorps in the UK alone.  Each and every organisation has  grown in the last 10 years spreading a network of purpose and positivity. We are driving the business world to a more impactful future. 

Take the time to see who in your network is a BCorp and where they’re demonstrating how powerful it is to lead your organisation with people, planet and purpose at the forefront.

#10YearsOfUKBCorps

We recently launched version 4 of the Website Carbon Calculator, our free tool to help accelerate the shift toward a more sustainable Internet. We make this available because we can’t build or maintain every website in the world, that in itself isn’t sustainable! Tools like this help to contextualise website emissions to take steps on your own digital estates.

But the ones we do build? We make sure they’re sustainable as they grow.

We work with many people post launch, and after retesting our current client’s homepages and service pages, the average score was a ‘B’. 

A ‘B’ is a good score that indicates sustainable progress, but we’re never satisfied with ‘good enough’. We know it’s possible to reach an ‘A’, and that’s what we strive for. Websites should always be evolving toward better performance, in line with their business growth.

Where there’s growth, there can be bloat

Okay, I recognise that is not the sentence we all wanted to read – but it’s the truth! As businesses grow, there’s often an urge to add more to the website. It’s natural, but sometimes it leads to unnecessary bloat. And while adding more can feel like progress, it can hurt the site’s performance and impact the user experience.

We start builds with low-carbon, efficient code, but that’s just the beginning. The real goal is to make sure that every person interacting with the site has a meaningful, enriching experience. This is where education and collaboration come in. Together, we can make sustainable design choices that benefit both the planet and the people interacting – internally and externally.

A true balancing act! But it is possible; Humanitarian Practice Network is a shining example of displaying varied types of content without increasing its impact on the planet and giving a rich experience for a global audience.

Digital sustainability is not a one and done

We always aim for an ‘A’ score at site launch, but we need to think of websites as living things that need care and attention to stay healthy and high-performing. That’s where continuous iteration of the site is key and keeping Experience Principles front of mind.

With us by our client’s side, we design thoughtful solutions to business developments, campaigns and product launches – demonstrating to your audiences you care about all their interactions with you. We’re on a mission, and we want to bring you along with us! If an image upload is too big, don’t worry, we’ll help you fix it and share a tip or two with your team to prevent it in the future.

Long-term vision

We can’t improve what we don’t measure. Regularly benchmarking our websites helps keep sites in flow with new tools, user needs, and the ever-changing digital landscape – like AI. It’s important to us to be transparent about our own work too because digital sustainability is a journey, not a destination.

It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room – the impact of a ‘bad’ brief.

Writing a brief can seem really daunting – especially when you are not a designer or coder yourself. But trust us, it doesn’t need to be a huge document that strikes fear into your marketing team as they try to wrangle the countless wants, needs and opinions from the finance team, senior leadership, sales execs and your best friend who just doesn’t like the site.

Avoid the panic and keep it simple.

Don’t sweat the small stuff! Adding every possible goal, detail, want and desire will confuse and complicate the responses you get. Trust the agencies responding to do the creative thinking bit and instead focus in – why are you building a new site? That should give you the overall goal. Of course it needs to X and Y and Z along the way but don’t get too fixed on those because they are not your overall goal.

Identify your target audience and put them front and centre. It’s ok for one of the audience to be your company, but remember thats just one group and 99% of website are focussed on conversion of some kind and your team are already converted! It’s also worth noting here heirachy is incredibly important – you might have 10 user groups but the site can’t whistle and dance for all of them across all of their needs and neither should it. Some pre-work on who the main site audience is will really give you a great head start on the work.

Here’s where you shouldn’t got top line and the detail will really help. Specify essential features, functionalities and integrations. Provide any open source documentation on API’s too, that always helps in terms of gathering realistic numbers and not inflated ones because the agency just doesn’t know enough. This will also narrow the field of agencies really quickly for you and make sure you get a better steer on solutions because not all team can or want to work on all platforms and integrations.

Spoiler alert – agencies know you bend the truth when it comes to budgets. It’s a lot easier if both sides are open and honest so both teams are on one page straight away. This will save time and also build trust right out of the gate whilst also making sure that the agencies responding to your brief are being as realistic as possible about the ability to deliver within your budget and time.

We don’t need more carbon heavy, clunky and chunky websites on the internet. Adding “please detail how you will make our site low carbon and accessible please” into your brief will sort those who can from those who can’t and will result in you being delivered a new, sustainable, low carbon site that will look after you well into the future. You shouldn’t have to compromise on performance or impact so this one should be your default.

It’s as easy as that! Happy brief writing!

Wholegrain has a three part mission statement.

We aim to create the best websites in the world.

We use our business as a force for good.

We work to accelerate the shift to an Internet that’s good for people and planet.

This mission runs through our organisation like a stick of rock. Sometimes it’s a balancing act. At times we are focussed more on one element than another. 

Website Carbon as an Internet for Good accelerant

Website Carbon is one of the ways we aim to shift towards a better internet. Since its launch in August 2018 the tool has been used to test over 1 million individual webpages, for free. For many, using the tool has been a stepping stone into larger actions within digital sustainability. It certainly was for me and many of my colleagues at Wholegrain.

We take the stewardship of Website Carbon very seriously as a result. It means that making any changes to the site takes time and care. The last major update came in November 2023 when we added a rating system to the tool. The ratings give more context to the results and allow for better benchmarking.

Since then the calculator has remained stable but relatively untouched, until today.

A major update to Website Carbon Calculator

On the 14th July 2025 we updated the calculator to the V4 of the Sustainable Web Design Methodology (SWDM). V4 is the latest version of the model. The process of updating the calculator has been delicate and one we were keen to get right the first time. Any issues that erode trust in the estimates the tool provides need to be avoided.

After extensive testing Website Carbon is now updated. If you have a keen eye you might see some changes to the results it provides.

How are things different now?

V4 is a major update to the SWDM and things are quite different under it. 

For one thing you might notice that the estimate your website receives in V4 is lower than in V3. Sites tested using the V4 model tend to have lower carbon estimates per page view than V3. Estimates for your webpages may be up to two thirds lower than in V4.

Why are the estimates lower?

SWDM uses data transfer as the main proxy for estimating webpage energy use. The core calculation is the total energy used by the internet divided by the total data transfer on the internet. The updated sources used for V4 of the model saw that data transfer has increased two fold. However, total energy use has fallen.

Essentially the internet appears to be operating more efficiently than previously thought. 

If the internet is more efficient do my webpage results matter less?

Not at all!

Efficiencies in the network will only go so far. The total data transfer on the internet is increasing hugely. Growth in AI and data collection continues at an increasing pace. Efficient, lightweight websites are more important than ever.

Your website’s footprint might represent a tiny fraction of the internet’s overall emissions. But a more efficient website has huge benefits outside of carbon reduction. Lower carbon sites tend to be quicker to load and have better structure. Humans like this, search engines like this, they can lead to higher conversion rates and it’s better for the planet.

API access and API endpoint

When Website Carbon launched 7 years ago it was a pioneering tool. As part of our “improve the internet” remit we offered access to the Website Carbon API endpoint to a handful of users. From today that is no longer the case.

The main tool isn’t affected in any way, but it’s important to be transparent when we make changes like this. Any people or organisations materially affected by the change have already been contacted.

The digital sustainability landscape has changed significantly since 2018. Building a similar tool to Website Carbon is accessible. For instance The Green Web Foundation has an open-source JavaScript library CO2.js. with extensive documentation and support.

The change to API endpoint access isn’t one we have made lightly. Changing the way it can be accessed allows us to put our time and energy into other areas.

Watch this space for more details about where our energy is being redirected.

Wrapping up

We’re pioneers in the digital sustainability space and have a duty to the community to continually refine our offerings as knowledge and technology evolves. We’re on a mission, and we make our tools and resources publicly available so others can learn and help mobilise this mission.

If you have questions relating to Website Carbon you can reach out to our eat@wholegraindigital.com.

If you want to dig deeper into your website’s carbon footprint speak to bailey@wholegraindigital.com about our Digital Sustainability Consulting.

If you want further reading or to take more action you can subscribe to our Curiously Green Newsletter, visit the Sustainable Wed Design site or download the Digital Declutter toolkit.

Here’s to many more years of website testing.

Back in 2017 when our founder, Tom was considering what B Corp™ could offer Wholegrain, he didn’t realise that it would be the beginning of a whole new trajectory for his career and business.

Tom and Vineeta founded Wholegrain with the purpose of creating a responsible business that did not negatively impact people or planet. And, as a nine year old web design and build agency in 2017, they had thought that they had achieved that, until one question in the B Corp™ certification left Tom stumped. What is the environmental impact of the products that you manufacture?

Well, what was the carbon emissions of a digital business, and how could we measure it?

Up until that point, most people would have answered zero, nothing, nada, zilch, for this question. Digital and therefore the Internet was green and therefore clean – there were no dirty, smokey emissions to consider, no realms of printed paper destroying trees, no waste, no weight, super light on the go – virtual. Right?

Leaves you feeling a little uneasy to just answer zero doesn’t it.

Now, if you’ve ever gone through our introduction to digital sustainability, you know that this is indeed not the case. The Internet is indeed very much a physical thing with an associated footprint equivalent to that of international aviation and its growing.

Since that day, Wholegrain has been on a mission to accelerate the shift to a greener internet that’s good for people and kinder to the planet by designing human-led, low carbon websites for brands with purpose.

The values of a B Corp™ are ultimately what is at the core of our DNA. So for us, nine years after becoming a B Corp™, the fundamentals are stronger than ever.

We work today for a better tomorrow, creating an Internet that is built for the people, not just the few controlling it.

We work everyday to make a positive impact for people and planet, not only in the focus of our work, but how we run our business. 

We understand the value and potential of an economy that benefits people and planet and we champion partners working in this way, alongside ensuring that our ways of working and digital outputs echo this approach also.

We never settle at the bare minimum, we strive for the best in all we do. It’s not good enough to just change your hosting to a renewable energy provider, there’s so much more we can do to reduce the overall impact of your site in the first place to not only benefit they planet through decreased carbon emissions, but also positively impact people through improved performance, accessibility and user experience. 

We encourage new voices through how we support our team with development and training, and also how we build out the Wholegrain team through our new recruitment process. 

We work as a movement alongside partners and the community. Together we are louder and we can make an impact.

And finally, in everything we do each day we are changing the way business is done, and that’s pretty cool. We’re working with our clients to understand how websites should be built and considered in 2025. We’re educating teams and the community on digital sustainability and the steps we can take, and finally, we’re supporting our own team to work in a supportive and exciting workplace, making a true difference in the world.

Sounds pretty exciting doesn’t it? And this all started with that one question in the B Corp™questionnaire – What is the environmental impact of the products that you manufacture? Well today we can confidently say that we do know the environmental impact of the products we manufacture (the websites we build, evolve and maintain) but we also know the benefit of building them in the way we recommend and how it has changed an industry. Thanks B Corp™

Interested in finding out more? Delve back into our archives to read Tom’s business case for B Corp™ five years in

After five months of open, positive and hopeful discussions in the Wholegrain Climate Cafe, we needed help. A few of our number were beginning to realise that while the websites we work on are energy efficient, the houses we live in are not! A session on how to make our houses more energy efficient and lower carbon was required.

While I’ve renovated our house in France, I wouldn’t claim to be an expert in sustainable refits! Giving incorrect advice about decarbonising a property can result in lengthy and costly repairs to put things right. We needed some experts.

Enter SuSy House.

When I put the call out for someone to come and speak at the climate cafe, Stuart from SuSy House kindly came to our aid. He and co-founder and CEO Bryan came to tell us about SuSy and pass on some retrofitting wisdom to us all.

About SuSy

SuSy represents the sustainability Ikigai for Bryan and this co-founder Mauro. De-carbonising housing in the UK represents a challenge for private homeowners. Put simply, decarbonising existing domestic properties is hard.

Using their experience in building, renovation and data analysis they created SuSy to help meet this challenge. They aim to use data to make more sustainable homes achievable for all. They built an app that creates a digital copy of your home with information you provide and other publicly available relevant data. This allows users to take informed decisions in any eco improvements they undertake.

The aim is to remove the friction home owners can experience. As Bryan puts it he wants people to be able to take “Climate Action without leaving the couch”.

Practical advice, freely given

Bryan and Stuart proved to be the right folk to talk to. We asked about solving issues like combatting damp, draft proofing, internal air quality and the best ROI you can get on bigger projects.

• Draft proofing is something most homeowners can cheaply and effectively tackle themselves. Arm yourself with some caulk, an applicator gun and smoothing tool and away you go.
• Damp issues can be harder to tackle but installing trickle vents, high up in a room is often an accessible place to start. Spider plants can apparently help in this too (while also entertaining your cats).
• Purging or upgrading poorly performing radiators (especially if you have an efficient gas boiler) can improve heating efficiency.
• Heatpumps are incredibly efficient but the costs are still high, making for long payback times in many cases.
• Often the best ROI and least invasive improvements you can make is to install a solar array and battery combo.

Perhaps the best advice Bryan and Stuart gave is to be tactical and targeted in the work you undertake. Wholesale improvements to any property tend to be expensive and time consuming. Using the SuSy House app or advice from trusted contractors allows you to identify smaller but powerful actions to take.

Taking small steps towards a bigger goal is a great way of achieving improvements.

Huge thanks to Bryan and Stuart for sharing their time and wisdom with our climate cafe crew. You can find out more about SuSy and the work they do with homeowners, landlords, local authorities and housing associations on their website. Their blog is a great place to find out more about retrofitting in the UK and worth checking out too.

If you’d like to find out more in person the SuSy team will be at the FutureBuild exhibition from the 4th to 6th March at the ExCel London. Tickets are free and they told us that they will be very visible and easy to find!

The scene – South East London on an unusually warm mid-October day. Georgie, Anneliese, Tom, Vineeta and I travelled via train from all directions to attend the 2024 Blue Earth Summit at Woolwich Works to join over 7,000 other individuals keen to learn from one another on how we can move the needle when it comes to the intersection of sustainability and business. 

The venue itself was not only very fitting given the building’s purpose has “expanded and adapted as the world around it changes”; but also evoked nostalgia for Georgie recognising the imprints her family physically laid on this very site! Her grandfather worked in the building for over 50 years, her mother would buy pie and mash in the nearby square, and we passed the building society her parents got their first mortgage from. The foundations of yesterday are peppered throughout the area, and it was inspiring to see how the community is repurposing what was a Royal Arsenal into a vibrant, community cultural hub.

Community was a throughline for this entire event. Personally, all of us were eager to catch up with familiar faces from various organisations, however more critically, wider community engagement was demanded in almost every presentation, panel and workshop.

It feels like an obvious and imperative action to embed in all organisational goals, but even reflecting on our own community we were eager to engage with, it was important to take a step back and think – how do we ensure we considerately and continually engage communities beyond our sphere? Especially when it comes to sustainability and equitability, are we all taking a bottom-up approach and considering those on the ground as well as those generations to come? Additionally, are we as a sustainability-focused community creating an inviting environment for those not in the space to come learn to be better, rather than be shunned? If you are asking yourselves these questions too, I’m pleased to tell you, there are some serious trailblazers who are doing just that, that you should look into:

• Cool Earth and Joycelyn Longdon trailblazing climate justice on the ground, authentically with community-led conservation projects.
• Sulaiman R. Khan demonstrates how disabled people are excluded from the climate movement, and also how they’re disproportionately impacted by climate change. Climate change is disabling. We need to change how we view disability and think of ourselves as ‘pre-disabled’ rather than non-disabled, then make the world more accessible.
• Earth Minutes amplifying youth voices at the event and asking the tough, but necessary questions. You can watch their intergenerational content series from the event, but on a day to day basis they work with young people to communicate their environmental research, campaigns and projects more effectively.
• Those on the panel regarding how high-investment ensures equitable community benefits, by demanding businesses start putting nature on the board. Most GDP is reliant on nature and businesses need to start treating it as an asset class. Investing in nature and the communities that business directly affects, results in regeneration on both fronts.
• Environment Bank – With a dedication to high-quality nature restoration, they actively connect organisations with UK farmers and landowners to evoke sustainable and local biodiversity conservation – rewriting futures and safeguarding the planet.

We’re miles better than where we started when it comes to community engagement, but it does not mean we have arrived. We must do what we can, every time, to create a seat at the table for all stakeholders when it comes to climate justice. Kalpana Arias, of Nowadays On Earth said it best “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu”. 

We know that risk is the most powerful motivator and when it comes to businesses, it was clear and this event and in world events, our climate is at risk thus businesses are too. So as businesses – we must challenge the status quo of trailblazing through resources for the sake of shareholders and start prioritising people, not pockets. 

If we all advocate for the collective community, we can evoke positive change. I’m encouraged by how many businesses are designing alongside their communities, but it’s time we create spaces that draw other businesses, outside of the sustainability space, to start prioritising this as well. That’s how we’ll see systematic change.

Happy Black Friday!

To prepare ourselves for the most wonderful, consumption driven time of the year, my wife and I watched Buy Now on Netflix last night.

Not so much Netflix’n’chill as Netflix’n’seethe.

As efforts to decarbonise our economy and society continue to gather momentum (perhaps in spite of COP29), the film provides a reminder that overconsumption is a parallel issue in need of tackling. From a web designer’s point of view the core messages from the film are stark: 

• Overconsumption for the sake of profit is rife in the developed world
• Planned obsolescence in tech and throw-away fashion encourages dangerous consumption
• The developing world is drowning in waste from the developed world 
• Websites, digital platforms and highly effective UX all contribute to this problem

In this time of climate crisis, the web design industry needs to take note of these issues and act accordingly. 

The birth of frictionless UX

The opening section of the film features the early days of Amazon.com and Maren Costa, Amazon’s first Principal User Experience Designer. In the early days, Amazon focused its efforts on making purchasing on the site as simple and efficient as possible. Millions of experiments and data points were analysed to not only remove friction in the process, but to actively encourage people to buy, even if they were just browsing. The lessons learned at Amazon have since been replicated and refined across the internet.

But it’s not just the UX patterns and methodologies that have been honed. Website and digital platform messaging and SEO techniques have helped spread messages encouraging unchecked consumption and greenwashing far and wide.

The message to me was clear. The sad truth is that the craft of our industry is part of the problem and that web design agencies (including B Corps) help encourage excessive consumption.

Just as every job is a climate job, every website can be a climate website. Website messaging and UX is a powerful message delivery system. We know this to be true and sell that vision to clients in every project we undertake. Using the most effective methods to spread information about the climate crisis, alternative business models and customer solutions can help turn the tide. 

What can web designers, marketers and agencies do?

Given that we are discussing consumption, e-commerce is the obvious place to start. Committing to putting choice back in the hands of the user and removing consumption-encouraging nudges can help change the psychology of purchasing. Instead, let’s support purchasing choices with transparency. Clearly showing the materials, provenance, supply chain, life cycle analysis, end of life options, resale value and communities supported gives users the power to make more informed decisions. Northern Playground, a brand I’ve written about recently, do this brilliantly.

Similarly, it seems to me that some friction could be added back into the process to help respect users and the planet. One click purchase journeys feature heavily in the film. Removing those easy options and developing more conscientious UX patterns, giving users space and agency to make purchasing decisions is the ethical thing to do. Perhaps more controversially, I would advocate for removing services like Klarna to discourage unaffordable consumption and debt. 

Showcase the alternatives

Something else I’ve noted is the priority (or lack thereof) alternative business models are given by brands. Brands like Mud Jeans have prominent rental and take back schemes on their websites. Other brands with similar schemes hide these options away. Giving equal or higher positioning for circular products helps show users that alternatives to liner consumption are available.

Talk about it!

Over and above the tech solutions are the human connection solutions. A theme from the film is people having realisations that their day to day work is harming the planet and recognising that nobody is talking about it. Maren at Amazon built an employee climate justice programme which forced Jeff Bezos to at least acknowledge the problem. Nirav Patel’s recognition that the products he was designing for Facebook and Apple lead to discussions about how to do things better. As a result, Framework was born, providing computers built with repairability and end of life in mind.

Talking to friends and colleagues about the climate crisis and how it affects your personal and professional life might be the most important action you could take. Holding space for this enables discussions to take place. It’s something we’re doing at Wholegrain. Hopeful conversations and sharing of ideas might just be the thing that helps save the world.

If you’ve watched Buy Now, let me know what you think. – curiouslygreen@wholegraindigital.com.

Pffft, personal carbon footprints? Oil companies came up with those decades ago. We don’t need to change, it’s the big polluters who should be taking action.

This is one of those arguments that comes up all the time in the climate space. It’s one I have sympathy with to a certain extent. We live in a society with a decades old structural reliance on fossil fuels and consumption. Structural and behavioural change tends to be glacially slow, especially when influenced by self interested global powers. Carbon Brief’s essential COP29 text tracker is testament to this (side note – bracket status updates have never been more exciting).

I don’t believe this lets individuals off the hook though. Personal choices still have a cumulative effect. Every choice or action we take has a carbon and resource cost. These choices have real world actions. Nobody is forcing drivers to choose oversized diesel guzzling SUVs over more efficient vehicles, but the climate cost is clear.

While our individual footprints might seem inconsequential on a global scale, how we consume and spend our time is something we can all influence. We have agency even if it is constrained by circumstance. But the anxiety and pressure we can feel to “do the right thing” can sometimes feel suffocating.

A little support always helps.

The burden of better

At Wholegrain and other similar businesses it can feel like the burden to be better is multiplied. Most of the Wholegrain team have actively sought a role here because of the company ethos and mission. The realisation that digital platforms have an unseen environmental cost leads the most conscientious in the industry to work to reduce that cost. It becomes a daily undertaking to help impactful organisations spread the word in a low impact way (digitally speaking).

This can become all consuming. 

It’s good to talk

Bob Hoskins had it right all those years ago. All the think pieces, posts, guides, substacks, reels and articles in the world can’t beat an open conversation with supportive people. Even the most sustainably minded organisations should hold space for climate related discussions. That’s why I hosted the inaugural Climate Cafe at Wholegrain last week.

The themes that came up were universally held. Guilt over personal choices can eat away at you even as you’re helping huge organisations make more impactful and sustainable choices. How can we maintain alignment of personal and professional actions in busy times? Most importantly, how can we bridge the intention/action gap effectively and consistently?

Overcoming these fears and challenges only gets easier with collaboration and collective action. On a micro and macro level this is what will deliver us to a more sustainable and just world. The answers and actions will be messy and imperfect, two words rarely seen in Wholegrain’s pitch decks and case studies.

This is why the power and value of a safe space to discuss climate change, anxieties and solutions are vital within sustainability focussed organisations. They help us align our day to day with wider requirements. Within a supportive structure, we can help each other make better choices and feel engaged with the challenges ahead. This might be as simple as sharing your favourite flexitarian cookbook (Meat Free Mexican for me), assuaging the guilt associated with an unavoidable trans-atlantic flight to see family or practical support to help decarbonise your money.

Whatever your first step to a lower carbon lifestyle looks like, it doesn’t always come easy, even to the most ethical of BCorp employees. But exercising our individual agency and taking action with the support of like minded individuals only makes it easier.

Want to run your own Climate Cafe?

You should! I used resources from the Climate Cafe website, and background from my Carbon Literacy training to set the initial framework. Giki is a great platform to help you quantify your personal footprint and identify actions to reduce it.

Most importantly though, if you want to discuss how to run a first session, let’s talk (curiouslygreen@wholegraindigital.com).

Andy

In February 2021, I published the book Sustainable Web Design with the publisher A Book Apart. At that time, awareness of how environmental issues relate to the web design and wider digital sector was minimal and I hoped that a practical, easy to read book would help educate, inspire and encourage positive action. I also hoped that it would help put sustainability on the agenda alongside ethical factors in the digital space, such as privacy and accessibility as part of a more holistic conversation.

I’ve been pleased by the reaction to the book and the impact it seems to have had over the past three and a half years, working as one part of a wider tapestry of initiatives that have rapidly accelerated interest in web sustainability not just in the UK but internationally.

I have to give a big chunk of the credit for the success of the book to all of my colleagues and friends who made it possible by contributing knowledge and support, but I also must give much credit to the team at A Book Apart. Their fantastic house style that combines real life examples and stories with practical guidance, delivered in a format that is both concise and fun, not to mention having lots of pictures to bring it to life, is a big part of the appeal of every book they publish.

I received a huge amount of support from their team during the writing and editing process too. Yes, the editing process was painfully rigorous, but it made the book far more compelling and robust, as well as helping me to become a better writer. The fantastic print quality of the original paperback also made it a product that people treasured and passed on, and the publisher’s cult following definitely helped it to find a critical mass of readers who could then become advocates for sustainable practices within the digital sector.

The end of an era

After such a positive start, it was with great sadness that I received an email earlier this year from the team at A Book Apart informing me that they are ceasing publishing operations, and that I would need to republish the book if I wanted it to remain available for sale. From what I understood behind the scenes, the company had been having some financial challenges for a little while and over the past year they had therefore been making a series of tough decisions in an attempt to steady the ship. While I wasn’t over the moon about all of the changes, I felt that they were probably the necessary decisions to take in the context of the bigger picture.

However, many authors weren’t happy with these changes and wrote collectively to the publisher with their demands. While I understood the concerns being raised, I personally didn’t feel comfortable with the specifics of the demands or more importantly, the tone of the approach, so I quietly opted out of being involved. A majority of authors did sign the letter though, and as A Book Apart were unable to meet the demands, they instead decided to cease operations and return all book rights to their respective authors. Perhaps it just accelerated the inevitable, but to me it felt like the final nail in the coffin of a good company going through hard times.

Re-releasing the book

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that along with all other A Book Apart books, Sustainable Web Design would soon cease to be available unless I either found a new publisher or re-released it as a self published title. The A Book Apart team were extremely helpful in trying to make the process as easy as possible and after some deliberation, I decided that the path of least resistance would be to self publish it as a print on demand title using IngramSpark. In theory this would require relatively little work to set up and would then make the book available internationally via most booksellers, not just on Amazon.

It turned out that the process of reformatting the book and getting it distributed via IngramSpark was a huge amount of work and took far longer than anticipated. This was mainly due to the idiosyncrasies of the IngramSpark system and the slow response times of their support, but it’s done now and the book is once again available to buy.

So what’s the difference?

The re-released book is now available as both paperback and eBook, with a few key differences from the original as follows:

New cover design

The first difference is the cover design, which had to be changed to remove the A Book Apart branding. I designed an updated cover that echoes the original but has a bit more character, incorporating a graphic from my favourite classic Wholegrain Digital t-shirt of a laptop plugged into a cable running through a series of wind turbines as shown in the photo above.

A little additional content

After much deliberation, I decided not to rewrite the book as a true second edition because it would have been a significant project in it’s own right that I wasn’t in a position to undertake. However, I did want to acknowledge how much has changed in the world of sustainable web design since the book was first published just three and a half years ago. The updated book therefore now includes an Afterword with my reflections on how the field has changed and giving some pointers as to what the reader may want to explore beyond the content of the book.

Lower pricing

The main criticism of the book until now has been its high price. This was due to it being a low volume book from an independent publisher, but I had always wished that the pricing was more affordable. When republishing the book, I therefore reduced the price significantly. The price of the paperback has been reduced from approximately £27 to £18 in the UK and equivalent internationally, and I have also reduced the eBook price to £9.60. Furthermore, the global distribution system of Ingram’s print on demand service will also reduce shipping costs for people in many parts of the world.

Different print quality

I always loved the print quality of the original book and it was something of a hallmark of A Book Part. One of the changes that A Book Apart had made before ceasing operations was to move to IngramSpark’s print on demand service and I have to admit that I was disappointed with the quality.

When republishing it myself, I therefore upgraded to Ingram’s premium print quality option. It’s still not as good as the original paperback quality, but it is at least decent. The downside is that the high print cost combined with the reduced pricing of the book basically now wipes out any royalties that I would have got, so all the money from each copy goes to Ingram and to the bookseller such as Amazon (eek!). However, I’m lucky that I can afford to forgo royalties and I think that the lower price and higher quality print will help to maximize the reach and impact of the book.

What about the environmental impact?

The original book was printed in Germany by a company that clearly cared about it’s environmental impact and used 100% FSC Certified paper. The downside was that the books were then shipped to the publishers warehouse in the USA for distribution and posted from there to customers around the world.

Since the printing was moved over to the IngramSpark system, the environmental footprint has clearly changed. The clear upsides are that only the exact number of books needed are printed and that they are printed as close to the customer as possible, reducing the impact of shipping. IngramSpark also state that they use “paper that is high quality from sound suppliers primarily from SFI, FSC
or PEFC certified mills for the books we manufacture”. It’s better than nothing though their overall environmental policy is pretty meaningless and I can’t help but wonder exactly what they mean by ‘primarily’. How much of their paper is not SFI, FSC or PEFC Certified?

As always, the most environmentally friendly way to buy my Sustainable Web Design book is to buy the eBook, but of course there are many good reasons to have a hard copy and the paperback is there for those who want it.

Where can you buy it?

You can buy the updated book from your preferred bookseller using the following ISBN numbers.

• Paperback: ISBN 9781068759406
• eBook: ISBN 9781068759413

Due to the efficiency of the distribution systems it has showed up on Amazon first (paperback and eBook) but it is also available from others such as Waterstones and my favourite, Hive.co.uk. You could also keep your eye out for second hand copies.

And it’s still free for non-profits

If you work for a non-profit in the UK, we’re still offering free copies of the original book to help your team learn about and integrate sustainable web design practices in your organisation. Simply fill in the form on our website to request your copy.

As the temperature drops, the land starts to bed in for winter and days shorten, conference season in the purpose space kicks off in force!

As a very vocal ‘business hippie’ who loves to mark the passing of the seasons in our day-to-day operations- and a parent who has just ‘survived’ the summer holidays – it always comes as a shock to me that this energetic time of year falls now when, I’m not going to lie, I often feel exhausted. But then, year in, year out I am surprised by how much I actually need this time out with like minded people and businesses to rejuvenate, to stoke the passion and to come back to the team brimming with ideas and actions. So, from September, here are my takeaways from attending B Corp’s Louder Than Words and GoodFest, for which I am incredibly grateful. I hope they bring some positive warming vibes of sunshine to your autumn days. 

The Power of Dreaming

GoodFest’s theme for 2024 was ‘Dream Big, Act Now’ which was at the forefront of all discussions. I was fortunate enough to attend a brilliant workshop with Carlos and Laurence from The Happy Startup School – check them out if you’ve not already heard of them! – who raised the topic of ‘Effortless Impact – do good, be happy’. That’s the dream, right? A lot of themes and learnings came out from this one session for me, but one of the most important learnings was to acknowledge the power of dreaming and the ideas that come out as a result of taking the opportunity to dream. Think about it – when was the last time you sat down and asked yourself things like, ‘What would you bring to life if anything was possible?’, ‘What would you love to master that excites your soul?’.

This power of dreaming really struck a note for not only me, but also for the whole event for it is indeed the dreamers and the creatives who will provide the solutions to the challenges we face.

In a particularly powerful session, Kalpana Arias, climate activist; ecosomatics educator and founder of Nowadays On Earth, referenced the brilliant Saidiya Hartman reminding us that ‘One of the powers of oppression is policing the imaginations’ and that it is indeed a privilege to be able to dream. And that dreaming cannot be in isolation and, as I will come to later, collaboration is as vital in future developments as it is for dreaming – on your own you are one crazy guy dancing, as Matt Hocking would share, but together we are a rave. Share those ideas and dreams, they might not go anywhere, but they might grow and in the case of our founders; 17 years later a 40 year old woman might be sitting at her desk writing a blog post about the power of dreaming and reflecting on how grateful she is that they followed their dream which allows her to follow her own to forge a career she is passionate about.

As Kalpana shared, ‘Don’t ask what someone needs. Ask what they dream of. What they love.’

Imperfection

This was my key takeaway from Louder Than Words. That striving for perfection in all we do is the enemy to progress. That isn’t to say that we can do the bare minimum and it’s ok, because we will build on it – music to our clients’ ears I am sure – but that if we want flawless solutions to everything we will never progress. The wider context for this was focusing mainly on impact reporting and sustainability goals and the rise of greenhushing in the wake of some very public greenwashing cases.

When it comes to our own sustainability and purpose led journeys, open dialogue and sharing imperfect progress is key to drive progress, because any progress is progress. Although transparency comes with risk, being more humble and acknowledging that this is new ground we are all treading will never be thought of negatively and will lift us all. Which leads seamlessly to my final takeaway.

Collaboration

We are lucky to work with fantastic partner agencies outside of the brilliant Wholegrain team, and in turn are part of collaborative networks within our communities – Clean Creatives, Business Declares, Better Business Network. It is through these networks of like minded people that we all learn and thrive, but it’s also pushing that collaboration forwards, beyond those that already know about us, to a wider, more diverse,  audience to continue to learn, adapt and evolve – just like the very best networks in nature. 

Ultimately, we can’t do this on our own or in isolation. Remember, together we are a rave. Together we are impactful. Together our small, single voice becomes a shout. As John Brown put it at GoodFest, when raising the ceiling we need to ensure that we are mindfully raising the floor too so we all start to rise.

So, there you have it. Just a quick summary of the key themes that stuck with me after the last few events and which have been buzzing around my head as I crunch through the leaves on lunchtime dog walks (avoiding the showers) and that I’ve already been bringing to the team. We’re off to Blue Earth Summit next week, which I am really hyped for as it’s always a font of incredible thinking and ideas, so we will be sure to share more. If you are heading over please do let us know and it would be great to catch up.

In July, we had the absolute pleasure of hosting a screening of the Welcome to the Jungle film, Responsible, alongside Director of the film, Tristan Lochon. Boasting the tagline ‘There is no business to be done on a broken planet’ Responsible is a documentary exploring the theme of corporate responsibility, and whether there is any such thing as a truly responsible business. 

Back in 2022, Wholegrain Digital co-founders, Tom and Vineeta Greenwood, were invited to feature in the film because of their mission to create a business that prioritises sustainability and declares responsibility to both people and planet. With values and purpose immensely aligning – collaborating with Tristan was a no brainer!

Responsible businesses such as Patagonia, Tony’s Chocoloney, the Positive Internet Company, and more, were featured, portraying an optimistic view of what business could and should look like, if it focussed on people and planet over profit. What better way to celebrate the release of the film, and Wholegrain’s feature within it, than getting together with friends and partners to screen the film?

The event itself was hosted at The RSA, a valued client of Wholegrain. It was fantastic to collaborate with The RSA on this event, as the space made for an atmospheric day. We had the space all day, which meant we could screen the film not just once, but twice! Being able to share this film with a variety of wonderful clients, partners and friends of Wholegrain was a great opportunity to maximise the impact of the film’s message by sharing it far and wide.

The day began with coffee and conversation, and it was great to see friends and partners of Wholegrain congregated. Following the morning session, we were fortunate enough to have Tristan join Tom on stage for a Q&A session – during which Tristan discussed his motivations for making the film, and the journey he’d been on with it. It was refreshing to hear Tristan talk about his desire to have the film present hopefulness and positivity, which can be rare when discussing the climate crisis. It was a helpful reminder that we should maintain enthusiasm and not underestimate the ripple effects of small changes, which can spiral into something much bigger than the sum of their parts.

After the afternoon screening of the film, we were very grateful to be joined by an esteemed panel. James Gill, of sustainable email marketing platform, Ecosend, was our first panellist, bringing a plethora of digital sustainability knowledge. We were also joined by Matt Bagwell, of Deep Green, a data centre provider with a difference – using the excess heat generated by data centres to power community facilities such as swimming pools, free of charge. The panel was completed by Director Tristan Lochon and Wholegrain’s own Tom Greenwood. So ensued a valuable discussion around responsible business and the daily decision making process involved when people and planet are centric to every decision – with a special focus on digital sustainability. It was inspiring to hear the motivations behind our panellists and to be reassured that yes, there can be such a thing as a responsible business, when you have the right people in the room and values remain central to the conversation. 

The day wrapped up with further conversation and networking – completed by the infamous RSA vegan chocolate orange cookies. It was refreshing to be in the room with likeminded people and overhear inspired (and indeed, inspiring) discussion following Tristan’s film.

The 52 minute documentary film, Responsible, was officially released in France on September 21st, with international distribution coming soon! Even better, you can organise your own private screening for your organisation or group. Just write to the Welcome to the Jungle team at: responsible@wttj.co 

All that’s left to say is a huge thank you from the Wholegrain team, to Tristan, our panellists, and everyone who joined us at a screening.

Following my last article (“How Digital Sustainability tells powerful Thrutopian stories.”) I’ve been pondering the importance of what content goes on our wonderfully optimised platforms. Can we legitimately call a site with a low carbon footprint “sustainable” if the content on it doesn’t help us move to a more sustainable future?

The websites we view contribute to our brainprint. CISL defines the concept as – “The psychological, sociological and cultural influence and impact of brand, marketing and creative work“. Every bit of media, content, branding and art we see contributes to how we interpret the world.

We’ve just sailed past our global overshoot day. In 2024 we are set to use 1.75 times worth of resources than the earth can sustain. The European Environment Agency (EEA) tells us that Europes’ consumption patterns are unsustainable. Backed by science, they call on the EU (and beyond) to significantly reduce its consumption footprint by 2030. Putting to one side issues like mobility, food and energy production for the time being, lets focus on consumption and the sites that enable it.

How might ecommerce and other related websites show thrutopian vision of a less consumptive future?

A big hitting example

Let’s look at Patagonia’s website here. When I arrive on their site the first message about them and their purpose is:

New Arrivals

Our Fall ’24 new arrivals are here.

To me, that’s business as usual messaging and not “being in business to save the planet” messaging.

Now, I’m not singling Patagonia out because I don’t think they’re doing a good job. I love their activism and story-telling. I think they are setting an amazing example with their new business ownership model and show they care as an organisation. But they have set themselves up as an agent for change so shouldn’t they be offering a more radical vision to help change the brainprint of their users?

Using the same exercise as with hosting we could say we need to:

• produce less clothing
• make better quality clothes that can be repaired
• have transparent supply chains
• embrace circular models and internalise currently externalised costs like end of life disposal.

To get there we can encourage more mindful purchasing and clothing retention behaviours. We can campaign for better repair access, seam width standards and waste disposal laws. We can prioritise renewably powered manufacturing provided by ethical organisations.

Here’s the kicker. Patagonia is already working towards most if not all of the thrutopian points above. You can find much of the information about what they do via the links above the footer. To me that’s the most important part of the messaging on their site. The EEA would agree.

What if the Patagonia site looked like this when you first visit:

1. Instead of a consumerist message you get a call to arms for repair instead. A message to love the gear you’ve got rather than buy for a new season.
2. Then you could reorder the hierarchy of the page. The way they do business comes next, showcasing what they do differently.
3. Patagonia tells brilliant stories about important topics. That could be the next piece of brain print their users see.
4. Then a call to action. Save our marine ecosystems.
5. Finally, the links to their products.

Consumptive messaging pushed to the bottom of the landing page of the most well known outdoor company in the world. How’s that for a change in brainprint?

How might this look elsewhere?

If the science tells us we need a transition and change in behaviour, then the websites we visit should reflect that. If every job is a climate job then every website can be a climate website.

Think about the last recipe site you visited. What if the first recipes and all featured recipes you were served were part of a climate friendly diet? The other recipes would still be available, but the brainprint of the site changes.

Fashion blogs and magazine sites could do something similar to what we discussed with Patagonia above.

Travel sites could push stories and guides about low carbon travel and sustainable accommodation.

Design and construction websites could prioritise content about alternative building materials and low carbon mobility projects.

Summing up

As digital sustainability professionals we are in a position to influence all aspects of the platforms we create and manage. True sustainability comes not just from the design, build and hosting of a site. It comes with sustainable messaging about how we transition from today to a more sustainable future. In my view, we can (and should) influence the brainprint of the sites we manage to help users understand and embrace the transition required.

Last week I wrote about how the estimated total carbon emissions of the internet have fallen according to the latest Sustainable Web Design Model. This week I’d like to shift the focus from emissions to the mineral resources required to keep the internet running. It’s important not to focus only on carbon emissions. Readers may note that the irony of this being written by the creators of Website Carbon is not lost on the author.

Today I’d like to discuss the concept of carrying capacity and its relationship with our digital lives.

Decarbonisation doesn’t solve everything

The inspiration for this article comes from this report – The environmental sustainability of digital content consumption. It’s a chunky investigation into, well, exactly what its title suggests. According to the report 60% of the world’s population has internet access. Of that 60% the average user spends 40% of their waking life online. If we are spending around 7 hours a day online (2 hours of which are on social media), this is going to have an environmental impact. It is also worth noting that global data traffic levels have risen 440% since 2019. This trend looks set to increase as AI continues to be pushed by all major players online.

The impact of our online activities is most often discussed in terms of carbon output. It’s the simplest way of measuring the impact of an hour’s streaming or loading a webpage. The report looks at the impact of our digital habits on a per capita carrying capacity basis.

Carrying capacity is how many full shopping bags you can carry from the car to the front door:

In carbon terms our current online habits account for 40% of our per capita carbon budget consistent with limiting global warming to 1.5 °C. Great news! If we decarbonise the grid, we solve the issue.

As always, it’s not as simple as all that. Focussing on the carbon outputs ignores the pressure on the mineral resources required to keep us online.

Resources and carrying capacity

While our current browsing habits account for less than half of our per capita carbon allowance, that’s not the case for metal and mineral resources. The resources required for the hosting infrastructure, delivery network and devices account for a big chunk of our personal allowance.

Internet usage currently accounts for around 55% of the per capita carrying capacity for mineral and metal resources use. Put simply, rapid decarbonisation of the net can’t mitigate the environmental impacts associated with the minerals required for electronic devices.

The extraction and processing of raw materials have huge impacts. For this article I’ll put the challenges facing the mining and processing industries to one side. It’s a thorny issue but things can be done to improve standards in the industry. One thing that is worth noting is that the impacts associated are regional. Land use, ecotoxicity and working standard issues often occur in locations far from where digital content consumption is taking place.

The % of the connected population will only continue to grow. Increased living standards (and associated improved levels of online access) should be something we strive for. But we can’t ignore the fact that the increase in internet users will also require more devices. You can’t have more devices without more mineral resources. Circular models and recycling won’t solve this issue.

Ideas and solutions

There are technical and practical solutions available to us here. Ultimately though this report leaves us with a more philosophical question around how and why consume digital content.

From a practical point of view, lengthening the lifespan of devices is the first step to take. Using devices and infrastructure for longer has to be key. Choosing refurbished or second hand tech, supporting brands that promote repairability and extending device lifetimes are all practical steps anyone can take. A brand such as Fairphone is a shining example of this ethos. Second hand platforms are widely available but I would advocate for searching for a more local solution if appropriate.

Designing sites and applications that are widely supported and have backwards compatibility for older devices and browsers could help reduce devices obsolescence. Performant and lightweight digital products will work better on older devices too.

As an industry there has to be more scrutiny over the resources used in the AI gold rush. Processing chips are often used once for training large language models and then discarded. Individuals and organisations should carefully question whether the use and support of AI products is worth the tacit approval of the platform’s current working practices.

More than this I think the figures revealed in the report should prompt a rethink of how and why we use digital services. We are back into the digital degrowth territory that we’ve touched on previously.

For organisations and website owners, we should be working towards more optimised user journeys. Less pages and more efficiency equates to less time online and data stored. 

We can perform content audits both on sites and social media to identify low performing posts and content. Deleting this information and being more mindful around how much and how often we create and post aids degrowth too.

As individuals, I think it comes down to just how much time we spend online! As a starting point I would ask:

• Could you work to use your mobile less?
• Could you use an app to be more focussed when you are online?
• Could you get away from your screen once a week?
• Could you get away from it all (in a digital and real sense)?

Ultimately all the insights into material usage are more proof that we have a long road to walk when it comes to digital sustainability. 

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this article – curiouslygreen@wholegraindigital.com

How can we reduce our digital carbon and resource footprints even as more connected users come online?

How do you feel about your digital consumption habits taking up so much of your mineral resource “quota”?

Andy

Article citation:

Istrate, R., Tulus, V., Grass, R.N. et al. The environmental sustainability of digital content consumption. Nat Commun 15, 3724 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47621-w

As we wrote last week, there are some major changes coming to the way internet emissions are calculated. With improved data sources and research we now have more accurate data to work with. At Wholegrain we’ve always compared internet emissions to those from other sectors and countries and we have been busy updating them inline with the new model.  

Here are a few stats to mull over while drinking your organic, fair trade, hot beverage of choice.

The internet is hungry for power but seems to have lost some of its appetite

Based on new research, the annual energy consumption of the global internet is 1021 TWh. (1 Terawatt hour/TWh = 1 billion Kilowatt hours/KWh). This figure, used in V4 of the Sustainable Web Design Model, is down from the previous total of 1988 TWh in V3. At the same time, the amount of annual data transfer on the web has doubled to around 5.29 ZB (1 Zettabyte/ZB = 1 trillion Gigabytes/GB). Some of the changes are down to new research and access to data across the network. Put simply, the internet appears to be becoming more efficient, which is great news.

A dive into Our World in Data

Using an average global carbon intensity of 481g CO2e per KWh of electricity (source) we can calculate that the 1021TWh of electricity used by the internet equates to 491 million tonnes of CO2e (all greenhouse gases combined).

Our World In Data puts the global CO2e emissions at 37.15 billion tonnes in 2023. Based on the new calculations above, the internet is responsible for 1.32% of them. According to the previous model, internet emissions were estimated at 2.57% of global emissions, so the proportion of emissions from the net has nearly halved.  

The Internet vs the World

If the internet was a country (please don’t dwell too long on that image) it would be the 13th largest emitter between Mexico (512 million tonnes) and Brazil (483 million tonnes). Previously we’ve had the internet higher up the list. While 13th might be unlucky, it still puts the internet as a higher emitter than countries like Italy, the UK and France among many others. (Source)

The Internet vs the Aviation industry

We often compare internet emissions to those from air travel, but which is the bigger emitter based on the new data? Well, it depends on what you mean by air travel.

The internet had higher emissions than International Aviation in 2023 (423 million tonnes vs 491 million tonnes) – Source. However things are slightly more complicated than that. International Aviation is defined as flights that take off from one country and land in another. The associated emissions are not attributed to any one country and calculated separately by Our World in Data.

For a truer, if less up to date, reflection we could look at Global Aviation emissions. Based on 2021 figures global aviation emissions accounted for 2.5% of global emissions. On that basis we can extrapolate that today’s global aviation emissions remain higher than today’s internet emissions.

The Internet vs low-income nations

As a final comparison it’s worth noting how global internet emissions compare to low-income nations. Low-income nations are defined by the World Bank as countries with a gross national income (GNI) per capita of $1,135 or less in 2022. Countries in this category are broadly located in Central Africa, but also include Syria, Afghanistan and N. Korea.

Effectively richer nations’ internet usage emits more CO2e than most of the economic activity of the poorest countries in the world. A reminder once again of the inequalities faced when it comes to CO2e emissions. 

No time for complacency

While the improved efficiency across the delivery network is great news it does not allow us to be complacent. As the network improves so does demand for bandwidth and data. New AI services and data harvesting programmes are pushing big tech firms further from their energy reduction and sustainability goals. 
The average size of web pages also continues to rise. In the past ten years the average transfer size of a web page for desktops has increased by 130% to 2.6mb. Mobile pages have increased even more dramatically, by 295% to 2.3mb. (Source)

Efficient, accessible websites designed for people and the planet remain just as important as they ever were.