For Chris Butterworth, if we’re serious about net zero, we need to act on the impact of our ever expanding digital world. The Information Communication Technology (ICT) sector accounts for 3.7% of the global total emissions, already higher than the aviation industry.

That’s why he switched from design and web development in 2021 to create Aline, a consultancy specialising in sustainable design, strategy and policy to help businesses reduce their digital carbon footprints. Instead of seeking virality on social media, which comes with its own heavy footprint, Chris wins clients, including Yard who later acquired Aline, by tapping into niche networks and cultivating meaningful work relationships.

In this episode, Chris addresses the importance and benefits of digital sustainability. If you are a business owner or entrepreneur-to-be, this can be your entry point to a greener operation. If you want to work in this space, don’t miss out the insights for what developers, designers and marketers can do. If you’re looking to change your habits as a user, there are some easy tips too! At the end, Chris also recommends two books that inspire sustainable digital design: Dark Matter and Trojan Horses by Dan Hill and Simplicity by Edward de Bono.

Listen to the podcast or read the transcript below.

Yongsi: Can you tell us what your job involves?

Chris: On a day to day basis, we do a lot of auditing for companies to help make sure their digital operations are in line with other sustainability-driven ones. We do this through education and workshops as well as auditing and strategising. The main focus of the past few weeks has actually been creating a new course to cover the fundamentals of digital sustainability.

Yongsi: The basic goal is to reduce the carbon footprint of the digital world.

Chris: Yes.

Yongsi: Why is it important to talk about digital sustainability?

Chris: Not many people know this, but the internet generates more carbon emissions than the aviation industry. It's been estimated to be around 5% of all global carbon emissions. That might not seem like a lot, but if it was a country, it would have been the fourth highest polluter in the world. It's absolutely insane. You link that to things like e-waste, which are electrical devices that are thrown away without being recycled. And we have a huge issue on our hands. We are creating more and more data every single day than we were in a full year 20 years ago. That explosion in data has created this issue where we are using more and more energy and hardware to power the internet. That's where the emissions come from.

Yongsi: Many people assume that going digital means going green, but things are actually not that simple.

Chris: It's definitely not that simple. Don't get me wrong. As I said earlier about the course, it’s going to be delivered online. We've taken care to ensure that it's quite lightweight. If you're comparing that to an actual classroom, it's still going to be lower emissions. For the entire course, it's roughly 46g of CO₂. I estimated that using the size of the videos, how long they are, the hosting infrastructure and some of the production. If you're comparing that to an actual classroom, that 46g is the same as somebody driving less than half a mile in their car. 

It's not saying don't use digital. It's saying use digital better. Obviously we use digital on a daily basis. Even recording this podcast, delivering this podcast, streaming the podcast, regardless of where you listen to it, it's going to create emissions. It's trying to understand that, be more conscious of that and make better decisions about how you use digital.

Yongsi: The Sustainable Development Goal 12 is about responsible consumption and production. Consuming digital content and producing digital content like us fall into this SDG. So it's important to talk about the digital carbon footprints.

Chris: Absolutely. There have been efforts to align the SDGs with digital products. I can share that link later so you can post it with the podcast as well. It might be interesting for those who work in technology to understand that as well and see how closely linked they actually are.

Yongsi: That's great. In addition to reducing carbon footprints, what other benefits do we get if we follow sustainable digital practices?

Chris: Being digitally greener means that your digital estate, such as your websites and CRM systems, will perform better because you're using a lot less data. Your hosting costs will be cheaper. Your storage costs will be a lot cheaper, even operational running costs. Even if you extend the life of your devices by an extra year, you are then saving a huge amount of money. By looking at buying hardware second-hand or refurbished, you are then sharing those embedded emissions with those who previously owned them. There's a huge amount of stuff and benefits to being greener. And as we all know, it lowers emissions by a huge amount.

Yongsi: It does make business sense to be digitally greener, but is it hard to implement those practices?

Chris: Some of the implementation can be very straightforward. Others that are a little bit more habitual are a little bit harder to change. To give an example, there was a study by Ovo Energy a few years ago that said if every UK employee stopped sending a thank-you email, it would save 16,000 tons of CO₂. That is a huge amount. I call it the typical British politeness of saying thank you at every opportunity because it's what we do. Basically, a lot of the time is confirming receipt of something. If that is business critical, send that response. That's fine. Make a note of it because then you can ultimately manage it later on - offset it, reduce it, whatever you need to do. If it's something generic, you shouldn't really need to do that.

I've got a lot of these statistics as well, especially going back to the previous space where we're talking about reducing cloud storage. There was a study by Dell a few years ago that said 97% of data is collected and then never looked at. That is a huge amount of waste. It's because for every kilobyte that you're saving, that you're storing somewhere, it uses energy. Because of that energy use, it’s creating CO₂. Reducing the amount of data is a key thing.

Yongsi: After knowing you, Chris, I have started cleaning my email chain when I reply to people. Especially when I send email to you, I also make sure I'm being concise.

Chris: Absolutely! I mean if it's going to be a one-word reply, don't send the email. There's a fine line with emails. It's interesting because obviously somebody has to read it, understand it and be able to act on it. If you put too much in there, people won't do it. If you put too little in there, people will ignore it. There are a couple of principles that you can stand by and a couple of practices. There is one called ‘five sentences’, which is that every email should be at the most five sentences. I like that because you can tell an entire story within five sentences. It's handy to try and use something like that because it's much more efficient in the long run.

I could talk about this all day. I'm pretty sure that over the course of my career, I've spoken about it for weeks, if not years. It's one of those subjects where you can go down the rabbit hole. What I'm talking about here is some of the more generic aspects of digital sustainability. If you really want to know, you could look at digital marketing as a whole - even with that that's a rabbit hole in itself. You've got email marketing and trying to make that sustainable. You've got web design and  development and trying to make that sustainable. You've got SEO best practices and trying to make that sustainable. There's all of these different aspects that make it such a huge thing. That's the reason why I talk about it and shout about it from the rooftops is to try and get people to understand that you can make small changes and have a massive impact.

Yongsi: Well, in order to ‘shout about digital sustainability’, you created Aline. I love the name. Can you tell us more about it?

Chris: Of course! The name itself comes from two things. Obviously, it's a homonym for ‘align’ when you're talking about aligning text, which is a design thing, or aligning values, which is something that you should be doing with your sustainability efforts, whether that is trying to manage your supply chain and find suppliers that align with your values, working with clients that align with your values or finding that alignment in other ways. It's also the shortest distance between two points and how you connect dots. You connect dots with a line. That's the thing - as soon as I start mentioning about digital sustainability and people start connecting those dots in their head, a line has been drawn. They go, oh my goodness, I can now fully understand it, or at least I've got some concept of it that I can build on.

In terms of how Aline got started, that comes off the back of my own career. My background is working within agencies. I've worked within design and creative agencies primarily as a developer, creating websites and web applications. It was only until 2018, I read a paper by Greenpeace that spoke about how bad the internet is on the planet. At that point, I needed to do something about it. I started implementing best practices, worked in a couple of other design studios, and set up my own one. I realised, after a lot more reading of my own, that there's more to digital sustainability than websites.

Back in 2021, I set up Aline and started doing webinars and workshops and stepping away from development. For websites and web applications or even within those there's more to think about when you consider how they're working and put together. I started doing that, talking to more and more people and getting the word out there and doing podcasts like this. It’s just brilliant. It has to be a part of that education and getting the word out there.

Yongsi: Not long after you started ‘getting the word out there’, Aline got acquired. Tell us how it happened.

Chris: I started a line in February of 2021 and then I actually got acquired in October 2021. Literally after eight months of working within the space. That in itself was a journey. I got acquired by Yard, who are a data-driven marketing agency based in Edinburgh and Cardiff. I won them as a client in June of that year. So four months after starting, I managed to get them as a client. We did an education piece, a couple of auditing pieces. At the end of all of that, at the beginning of September, the group CEO approached me and said, I really love what you're doing. I see a massive future in this. I want to be a part of it. Can we buy you? I'm like, uh okay.

I think that's the dream for anybody that starts their own business, isn't it? To get acquired. But for me, it brought freedom. If I'm perfectly honest, it meant that I still had and still have complete autonomy. But when it comes to additional resources, I'm not having to chase invoices. I'm not having to chase money. I'm not having to chase clients for anything like that because I have a team to do that. It means that I can rely on people to do additional bits, whether that is an SEO audit or some form of marketing audit. It's been brilliant. It has been really good.

Yongsi: You got connected to Yard because of you doing a workshop with them. But I noticed that you are also quite minimal on social media. Before the acquisition, how did you promote yourself?

Chris: That was approaching small businesses, networking opportunities and doing a lot of work with creative groups. Through that, I was able to win some clients and get some work in. Then I started these conversations all over again, did the workshops again and built on the workshops as well. So let's try and do different webinars for different sectors, different workshops for different sectors, try and specialise in them as well. Instead of it just being a fundamental foundation of knowledge on digital sustainability, I actually look at different aspects of it, allowing those individual teams to go down their respective rabbit holes or collective rabbit holes if they really wanted to do it together. It grew quite naturally from that. It still continues to grow.

Yongsi: I think the essence is, instead of casting a huge net to seek attention on social media, you need to cultivate meaningful relationships, which comes back to using digital resources in a more conscious way.

Chris: Absolutely. I have a network of people that can refer work to me if they come across it. There's a lot of people that are in connected spaces. We've got a network of other developers, marketers, creatives who all care. The key thing is I don't want to attract just anybody. I want to attract people who care. When they care they will do something about it. We're at the point now where every single kilogramme of emissions counts. Getting people that actually already do something is better than trying to get somebody who does nothing. If they already care about the environment or doing something, they're more likely to understand and do something extra. It's a journey for them as much as anything else. So it’s trying to get everybody to be a part of that.

Yongsi: On the other hand, projects like Greensider need to rely on social media. Then you start comparing the numbers of followers, the likes, etc. But at the end of the day, those numbers are actually not so meaningful as they seem, aren't they?

Chris: No. Social media is a double-edged sword. It helps you get your name out there, but it also creates a huge amount of emissions. There was an episode of Dispatches, which is a documentary series here in the UK, talking about how bad browsing habits are killing the planet. It touches on digital sustainability, which is really good. It also talks about how a single post by Cristiano Ronaldo uses as much energy as 10 houses do within a year. Now, that is insane because not all of that electricity will come from renewable energy. It'll create a huge amount of emissions because of it.

Again, are all those likes from the right people? Does that equate to work? Does that equate to kind of getting people through the door? Does that equate to getting people to sign up to something? Because a lot of the time it doesn't. That's why when it comes to our marketing efforts, I tend to take a more personal approach. It will always tend to be me just in front of people just going, hiya, nice to meet you. A: because I think I'm a really friendly person. B: because that's how I like to cultivate working relationships. I don't want it to be hard sell all over. I'd prefer it to be - alright, have you thought about doing this? Have you thought about doing that?

There's loads of networks that are connected to this. There is Work On Climate, which is a more generic sustainability group and community. There is Climate Action Tech, which is technology focused and can be development focused. The Sustainable UX is about sustainable user experience design and accumulates a huge amount of resources on that. There’s Ethical Design Network where it touches on other aspects of sustainable and better design, where it's not just sustainable but also better for people. There's a huge amount of resources out there. It's growing day by day. There are more startup incubators than ever before.

There are more opportunities out there. But with those opportunities comes competition. One of the things that I've seen a lot recently is the absolute explosion of artificial intelligence. ChatGPT, Bard… All of these AI programmes use a huge amount of energy themselves, whether it's during their training - training a large language model(LLM) takes a huge amount of energy - or simply using them. I saw some stats the other day. They showed that for every response that ChatGPT generates, it creates over 4g of CO₂. That's per per response. Now a Google search is roughly 0.2g. That might not seem like a lot. But if it's being used millions of times, you're then talking about millions of tons of CO₂ or kilograms of CO₂. It's the same with ChatGPT. The usage has grown. There are more and more LLMs that are being created every single day. The key thing is if I'm generating that amount of CO₂, I'd need to see the benefit of it outside of winning more business, a pretty picture, a marketing strategy or something else that I would have used it for. Don't get me wrong. While it's probably better and quicker at doing certain things than I am, I need to use it responsibly. It's the same with digital. That is the message of digital sustainability in general - it needs to be that thing of having a positive impact. It can't be using it just for the sake of using it.

Yongsi: I would like to wind back and talk about your career journey. You already mentioned that you were in web development before creating Aline. But I know your career journey is a very interesting one. You did something completely different to web development. Can you share some details please?

Chris: I was a chef many many years ago...

Yongsi: Do you still cook?

Chris: I still cook at home. I cook meals every single night for myself and my family which is really good and interesting. I'm trying to get my family involved because I've got two young kids. It can be quite difficult. The cleanliness person in me screams and shouts, because obviously trying to get a four-year-old to start mixing or stirring something usually ends in a mess.

I did that for roughly six years. I was 15 when I got my first kitchen job. I stopped when I was 21. I had education in between. College, university, everything like that. But then I injured my knee which meant that I could no longer do that. I couldn't stay on my feet for hours at a time. If you know a chef, you'll know that the hours are incredibly long and you don't really get a chance to sit down. It was unfortunate that it had to come to an end in that way.

After that, I did a little bit of soul searching and started playing around with design. I thought, I quite like this. I think I'm pretty good at it. Let's make a go of it. So I started designing stuff, doing branding identities, marketing materials and everything like that. Then everybody kept asking the same question: do you do websites? I don't but I can try. That was when I started learning web design, web development and started using WordPress as a content management system. Then everything took off. I spent years up and down the country working with agencies, working with some incredibly large clients doing work for Speedio, IWG, IHG, We Buy Any Car, which is quite big in the UK, and Harris Brushes, B&Q, Tata Steel, Accenture.

After doing all of these development projects, I was ready to move onto the next thing. I was always going back and forth between my design skills and development skills and then learning project management methodologies and going back to development, learning about user experience design, going back to development. But learning about digital sustainability literally turned my whole world upside down because I could see how all of these aspects of the work that I've been doing can have a negative impact on the world. The rest is history. I started Aline and here I am today.

Yongsi: I'm asking this because cooking is one of my favourite things to do. Do you see any connections between cooking and development?

Chris: I have a few recipes that I have perfected. I know that sounds really big-headed but they are recipes that I've crafted over years and years and years. They are perfect. They are brilliant. I change things in them every now and again, depending on my mood. But it's just expanding your repertoire and being able to do different things. For example, it used to be like a potato hash, which is real comfort food, especially for me as somebody from the North of England. It's expanding from that to a vegetarian chilli.

I've even recently started baking, making different types of bread and even pizzas. There's nothing better than getting a four-year-old to try and make their own pizza. It's little things like that. For me the kitchen is the heart of a home. Regardless of how big or small your kitchen is, you need one. For me, it's always really important to make it fully functional, to get people involved, to try and make everything you can, and expand your knowledge.

That type of thinking, that expansion is something that I really relate to within development. What I really relate to within digital sustainability is that I have these core topics within it. Over the years, I've expanded and brought all the topics in. Originally it was just web design and development. From there, I learned about sustainable design principles, sustainable development principles, and digital marketing.  And then it's DevOps, FinOps, SecOps. All of these different operational things that the organisations use all touch on digital sustainability that nobody really thinks about. Social media has to be a massive one as well. The amount of data that's being stored and collected is just unreal. So there's parts of it that I can kind of link back and forth.

Yongsi: You were expanding your skill sets from the core of web design and development. When you decided to pivot into digital sustainability, did you need to work on any specific sustainability skills?

Chris: It's an interesting one. I don't see that I have any special skills apart from the fact that I'm a good communicator - I think I just talk way too much. I've got quite an analytical mind. I think that comes from being a developer for so long. I'm really good at problem solving. Because of that, it means I can see all of these little intricate parts of stuff that need to be fixed or changed or whatever…

Yongsi: And draw a line to it.

Chris: And draw a line to it. Exactly! This is the thing. I love the name.

I've obviously got skills as a developer and as a designer, but I think the bigger picture is just being able to communicate. You've got to be having the right message and the right way of delivering it because otherwise nobody's going to listen. So I focused on being able to talk and get my point across. That’s the key skill that I have for sustainability.

Obviously, there are bits and pieces that you can do. There are an absolute ton of qualifications out there if you feel that you need that head start. I didn't go that route. It's one of those things you can do if you feel like you need to. If you feel like you need to have that standpoint of that piece of paper so that you can do something, go for it.

Yongsi: What do you think of the career prospects for digital sustainability?

Chris: I see the demand growing, 100%. But I think they're going to be incredibly specialised. It's going to be more looking at those particular areas and trying to make them green. It's going to be green marketers, green designers, green developers. There's going to be green CTOs, green CEOs, green CMOs. It's going to be all of these different roles that are going to start transitioning to being green.

In terms of the skills that each one of them needs, that differs depending on the role itself, but they're going to have that same fundamental thing, which is they care and want to have a positive impact. There's a huge amount of green tech and clean-tech startups out there that are going to grow. Other organisations are going to have to get on board with new changes and new stuff that's coming up. I definitely see it growing. I definitely hope that it beats the growth of AI massively. I hope that people come to the conclusion that AI needs to be used well, as well as digital in general. We'll see what the future holds.

Yongsi: Do you have any advice for people in the industry to make the shift to digital sustainability? For example, what should a developer do?

Chris: From a developer perspective, that's quite an easy shift because the key thing that you're focusing on is page size. If you focus on performance, such as making pages load faster and more lightweight, that's pretty much half the battle. Because it's transmitting less data, it's creating less emissions. It's as simple as that for developers.

For designers, it's having that understanding of how their design changes impact on development. Those old-school websites with a big full-screen image should be buried because they're always huge and don't really add a lot of value to a design. It’s my opinion, but I'm pretty sure a lot of people feel the same way. Then it's understanding the choices that they make, minimising the amount of images that they use, looking at if there needs to be images. Can there be illustrations? Can there be vectors? All of this sort of stuff. Try to bring those two together and look at user journeys and digital touch points. Make sure they are as short and lightweight as possible. Try and make it as sustainable as possible.

In terms of the other roles that are outside of that, such as a digital marketer, one is to work with designers and developers. But in terms of doing email marketing or displaying ads, it's measuring everything as much as you can. It's basically trying to achieve the highest Clickthrough rate (CTR). The bare crux of it is getting your ad in front of the right people at the right time. That's going to be the biggest battle within any advertising company, trying to get an ad in front of the right person at the right time.

Yongsi:  Great, so a lot of impactful work needed to be done. Outside of work, do you get climate anxiety?

Chris: All the time. But I know that I'm trying my hardest to have a positive impact. Obviously not just for myself, but for my family and for the future, and for their future. I have it all the time, especially locally we have been hit with floods from some quite heavy rain recently. Every time we have that, it brings back that climate anxiety.

Yongsi: Do you have any way to tune out from the climate anxiety?

Chris: Not really. I just have to find some positive news. There's always something positive out there that takes my mind off it. Another group is one called Climate Clock. Every so often they have a news feed of hope. If I have my climate anxiety, I read something from there. It always manages to put a smile back on my face and manages to appease that anxiety a little bit.

Yongsi: What about playing music? Because I can see the guitars in the background.

Chris: They're more of a distraction than anything. I don't play a half as much as I used to, but music is a massive thing as well. Music actually helped a lot when I first injured my knees back when I used to be a chef. It's something that's got me through a lot of times. Music always helps, listening to it or playing it.

Yongsi: Before we wrap up, do you have any recommendations for reading about sustainability or anything that's inspired you?

Chris: There's a couple of really good books that I can easily recommend. One is Dark Matter and Trojan Horses by Dan Hill. It's all about shaping conversations to talk about complex subjects, borrowing things from film storytelling, such as the whole idea of using the MacGuffin. I love that word to try and push a conversation further. It's short but really intense and a good read.

The other book I would recommend to people is Simplicity by Edward de Bono which is all about shaping interactions to make them simple regardless of how complex the process behind it. For me, things can be really complicated such as Beacon, because I built it. I know all of the inner workings of it. But for somebody who just sees the actual web application and the report, it’s incredibly simple. The messaging beyond that is important. What it starts can be complex, but that part in itself is really simple. That's one of the reasons why I recommend it is that it tries to make really complicated things really simple.