BACKSPACE: Make your website carbon neutral

Hey Product Hunt, The average website emits 2,112 kg CO₂ a year ¹. We were as gobsmacked as you to learn this. This is the equivalent of driving from Portugal to South Korea. Somehow, after more than 20 years of using the internet and 15 years of building it, it just had never occurred to us. Out of sight, out of mind. 🤔 The problem At this point, no one is unaware of climate change; and how the only way out is to drastically reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we pump into the atmosphere. For the last few years, we've been on a quest to reduce our personal footprint. However... our digital impact? Never crossed our minds — until we stumbled upon a figure: if the internet were a country, it would be the 7th most polluting ² ³. That made us curious — and concerned about our own role in this. We optimized the heck out of all our websites (highly, highly recommend a book called Sustainable Web Design⁴ — hugely inspiring). However, the impact was still measurably large. Considering there's so much out of our control, how could we make our digital footprint carbon-neutral? 🛠 The solution To scratch our own itch, we made BACKSPACE. We: - track your website’s CO₂ emissions in real-time - remove the CO₂ automatically through high-impact, certified carbon removal tech providers (backed by companies like Stripe, Shopify, Microsoft, and more) - provide you with insights on how to reduce your digital footprint. Our long-term goal is to render ourselves useless, and for you to be naturally close to 0 How does BACKSPACE work? Simple: 1. After creating an account, simply drop the backspace.js script onto your website 2. That's it. There's no step 2. At the end of every month, we calculate your emissions and remove the equivalent through funding carbon removal tech. About that, let's talk about how carbon actually gets removed from the air. 💨 Removing CO₂ from the air The latest studies say that reducing our emissions isn't enough. We pumped so much CO₂ into the atmosphere, and are collectively reducing our emissions so slowly, that removing carbon from the air is an absolute necessity to meet the world's climate goals ⁵. Because of that, we made a decision to exclusively support carbon removal technologies, which remove CO₂ from the air through highly innovative processes. Standing on the shoulders of giants, we’re backing the most impactful carbon removal projects selected by the scientific panel assembled by Stripe. Here are a few examples of the technologies we (and you) will be backing: - injecting CO₂ into concrete - sequestering CO₂ in basaltic rock formations - capturing CO₂ in a natural mineral called olivine - injecting bio-oil into geological storage - electrochemically removing CO₂ from the air 📉 Reducing the CO₂ you emit in the first place One of the things we're most excited about is raising awareness of the things you can do to naturally reduce the CO₂ your website emits. On your backspace dashboard, you'll be able to view insights about your website's pages and strategies to help you reduce your impact. The great thing about this is that it'll naturally reduce the amount you need to remove, making it both cheaper and greener. This part of the product is still in development and we ambition to build the most advanced impact dashboard out there. 📈 Increase your conversions In a recent study ⁶, 7 out of 10 people would pay 35% more to an environmentally conscious brand. To help you raise awareness with your own audience, we provide you with a badge you can embed on your website, displaying how much CO₂ you removed. Start removing your website's emissions at https://backspace.eco. There's also a nifty calculator on the homepage that lets you estimate how much your website emits — no sign-up/commitments. Thank you to everyone who helped us test this, and to @bramk for hunting us. @ivanmaeder & @ricardogo Sources: ¹ https://www.wired.co.uk/article/... ² https://www.bbc.com/future/artic... ³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li... ⁴ https://abookapart.com/products/... ⁵ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/ ⁶ https://www.ibm.com/downloads/ca...

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Make your website carbon neutral

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