Digital sustainability

At Z we take sustainability seriously, and that includes when we’re online. Here are some of the ways we help reduce our carbon footprint in the digital world.

Our commitment to digital sustainability starts here

Everything we do online has a digital carbon footprint. The Internet consumes massive amounts of power in Aotearoa New Zealand, and around the world, every day.

Some research has estimated that by 2025, the IT industry could use 20% of all electricity produced and emit up to 5.5% of the world’s carbon emissions.

Anything we can do online to help reduce those energy needs is good for our communities, and our planet. So here are some of the digital sustainability guidelines we follow here at Z to make sure this website is as light and efficient as possible.

Fewer videos and pictures

Pictures and moving images sure look pretty, but they’re not always essential for getting our message across – and they consume more power. That's why we always try to keep our imagery to a minimum, just enough to tell the story we want to tell.

Optimising assets

Websites are made up of lots of different assets, like HTML, fonts, and scripts. All of these need to be stored in the cloud and then downloaded onto your device when you visit a webpage. Optimising these files reduces the amount of energy they use when stored and downloaded.

Keeping pages simple

In a similar vein, we've also streamlined the way our website pages load on your browser – thus reducing energy use.

Full transparency

At Z we love a good shout out to sustainability, and we like to be up front and honest about our emissions too. So we've calculated the carbon emission per page view using official IEA (International Energy Agency) data and displayed these on relevant pages of our website.

That’s the digital world, now what about the real world? Find out more about our sustainability goals.