Volkswagen Canada recently announced its collaboration with TYPE1 to launch an education campaign focused on sustainability in the digital world, and initiatives to reduce the company’s digital carbon footprint.
The Carbon-Neutral Net program provides a more sustainable browsing experience for consumers with black and white text, resulting in significantly less embedded data on their website’s electric vehicle web pages.
According to a Canadian survey done by Volkswagen Canada, “73 per cent of Canadians are unaware that online activity has a carbon footprint, especially the internet,” and “81 per cent said they wanted to try to reduce their Digital Carbon Footprint.”
Volkswagen Canada shared emissions-related data in a press release on February 4, saying that “search queries, streamed videos and cloud computing are executed billions of times a day, increasing the global demand for energy and as a result, increasing carbon emissions.”
The OEM added that “reducing the amount of data embedded in online media can lower the amount of CO2 produced and reduce our digital carbon footprint.”
To help reach their sustainability goals, Volkswagen Canada has replaced all colour and photographs on the electric vehicle section of their website with more than 1.5 million live ASCII text characters. The result is a browsing experience that is “cleaner than 99 per cent of the 2 million-plus pages tested by Website Carbon (the digital emissions calculator),” said Volkswagen Canada.
The initiative is part of Volkswagen’s mission towards global sustainability as it encourages consumers to Be the Change. The Volkswagen Group has already made a $50 billion investment towards greater environmental sustainability with the launch of their all-new, all-electric ID4 vehicle.
