Carbonalyser by The Shift Project

Overview

The add-on "Carbonalyser" allows to visualize the electricity consumption and greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions that your Internet browsing leads to.

Visualizing it will get you to understand that impacts of digital technologies on climate change and natural resources are not virtual, although they are hidden behind our screens.

To evaluate these impacts, the add-on:

Measures the quantity of data travelling through your Internet browser,
Calculates the electricity consumption this traffic leads to (with the "1byte" model, developed by The Shift Project),
Calculates the GHG emissions this electricity consumption leads to, following the selected location.

Features

"Run analysis / Stop analysis" - run or stop the measuring of data volume travelling through the Internet browser. Results shown in the pop-up window are calculated for the cumulated running time.

"Reset data" - erase measures and calculations made during the running time to reset the analysis to zero.

Chart area - features rankings of the top 5 websites in terms of data traffic and their share in the total data volume generated by browsing the Internet.

"Select your location" - allow to choose the electrical mix to apply in the calculations of GHG emissions (by default, if none is selected: average world mix is taken)

Results area - features:

Time during which the device has been running, from the start of the analysis,
Quantity of data generated by Internet browsing,
Electricity consumption generated by data traffic,
GHG emissions this leads to,
Comparison of GHG emitted by browsing and GHG emitted by charging a smartphone,
Comparison of GHG emitted by browsing and GHG emitted by driving a car.

The box "How to change that? What responsibility?" links to publications from The Shift Project about environmental impact of our digital uses and solutions we have at individual and collective scales.

Privacy

None of your data are collected: all browsing data are analyzed directly on the user device and are not sent or processed anywhere else in any way.

The source code of this program is available in open access, to ensure transparency and for any other purpose.

Support & source code

Questions, bug reports and feature requests are to be addressed to communication@theshiftproject.org

Source code is available in open access: https://github.com/supertanuki/Carbonalyser

Contributors

Developer: Richard Hanna.
Designer: Gauthier Roussilhe.
In partnership with Maxime Efoui-Hess for The Shift Project.