Volkswagen Canada Launches the Carbon-Neutral Net

A DIGITAL EXPERIENCE CLEANER THAN 99% OF 2-MILLION+ PAGES TESTED

TORONTO, Feb. 4, 2021 /CNW/ - Volkswagen Canada is reimagining the future of mobility and encouraging consumers to Be the Change. With new initiatives, new vehicles, and a new way to move, the Volkswagen Group is ready to hit the road with a worldwide journey toward sustainability – starting with a $50 billion investment into e-mobility efforts, and the launch of their all-new, all-electric ID.4.

Now, in collaboration with TYPE1, Volkswagen Canada has launched The Carbon-Neutral Net to educate Canadians about sustainability in the digital world. In doing so, they've created a more sustainable browsing experience that reduced electric vehicle web pages to little more than black and white text — even the images — that has significantly lowered the amount of embedded data.

What is a Digital Carbon Footprint?
73%* of Canadians are unaware that online activity has a carbon footprint, especially the internet. 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.^π

Surprisingly, the internet accounts for around 4% of global CO₂ emissions – the same as the airline industry.^† While 72%* of Canadians were surprised to learn that the internet accounts for as much CO₂ as the airline industry, 81%* said they wanted to try to reduce their Digital Carbon Footprint.

How is this possible? By reducing the amount of data embedded in online media, which can then lower the amount of CO₂ produced and reduce our digital carbon footprint.

Volkswagen brought their sustainable digital vision to life by removing all colour and photographs and replaced everything with over 1.5 million live ASCII text characters.

The result? A browsing experience cleaner than 99% of the 2-milllion+ pages tested by Website Carbon (the digital carbon emissions calculator), who conducted a full manual assessment of every page in the browsing experience to verify the results. The Carbon-Neutral Net produces an average of only 0.022 grams of CO₂ per page view, compared to the average website which produces 1.76 grams of CO₂ per page view.^‡

Now, all of Volkswagen's sustainability-focussed content is visible the way it was meant to be read: in the most carbon-efficient way possible.

See The Carbon-Neutral net: https://www.vw.ca/carbonneutralnet/en/
See more on Website Carbon 
See more on TYPE1 (a multi-disciplinary team including TAXI, Wunderman Thompson, and others)

For hi-res imagery, please click here.

For further inquiries or to connect with Volkswagen,
TYPE1, or Website Carbon for an interview, please contact bicom directly.

† https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think   
* Source: survey done by Volkswagen with 1500 Canadians
‡ https://www.websitecarbon.com/ 
π https://www.myclimate.org/information/faq/faq-detail/what-is-a-digital-carbon-footprint/ 

SOURCE Volkswagen Canada

bicom Communications, Liana Timbol, [email protected], 416.504.1440 ext. 210