Co2stats.com. It’s a site which greens your visitors. How? You can put a widget on your site which tracks the number of visitors as well as the electricity that’s likely involved in powering your site (check out our widget on this blog). It then offsets the amount of carbon produced by being online. Co2stats.com has realistic numbers because it takes into account server usage, locations of your visitors, computer types, window and monitor sizes, local fuel mixes, download sizes and times. For the offsetting part, Co2stats adds up all the numbers it gathers every month and, based on the total, purchases Green-E certified Renewable Energy Certificates. These certificates are linked to Native Energy and Sustainable Travel International. As a Co2stats user you can check up on the number of certificates your website has generated every month. Regardless of where you’re hosted, you have the chance to get your site carbon neutral in a few mouseclicks.
Click4Carbon.com is a UK for-profit company that goes about protecting the environment through online carbon awareness by being commercial. Its vast online store offers shoppers thousands and thousands of products as well as a chance to calculate how much you need to spend for you to have neutralized your online presence. You can go further than just neutralize your presence and even save an X amount of trees. In case you don’t want to purchase products but still want to be green when you’re online you can use the organization’s carbon neutralized search engine. Using it makes you automatically a green visitor. Click4Carbon donates at least 50% of all profit its huge online store makes for planting trees and recently signed up with the Plant-a-tree-today Foundation.
If you’re on Facebook, check out Greenbook. The application’s creators claim their sponsors offset the carbon footprints of all the people that sign up. It works on the same formula as Co2stats and is sponsored by TerraPass and Teecrush.
In case you think this is all a bid exaggerated, think again; the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which is considered the world’s most stringent paper certification agency, is looking into producing certificates for businesses involved in matching your carbon offset needs with environmental goals.