Our commitment

In Tate’s Digital department, we are fully committed to reducing our carbon footprint. As the team responsible for the Tate website, our actions must go beyond our office walls.

It is estimated that the communications and technology sector is responsible for 5–9% of global greenhouse gas emissions. These can be traced from the power needs and emissions of the devices in our hands and on our desks, to the servers storing and distributing data, which require large amounts of electricity and cooling. The production of Tate’s website spans this entire scope.

Since 2019, our Digital Green Team meets regularly to plan ways to reduce our digital carbon footprint. We aim to reduce our website's impact at each stage of development.

Our actions

So far, we have:

  • Moved to using a more efficient CMS (content management system) which helped reduce tate.org.uk website emissions from an estimated 45 tonnes of CO2e in 2019 to an estimated 27 tonnes in 2023
  • Removed video banners and animated GIFs
  • Improved efficiency of image delivery
  • Started estimating the climate impact of the website
  • Created guidance and a carbon footprint calculator for our website editors to reference

And we work continuously to:

  • Simplify user journeys and improve SEO, which increases discoverability and helps our audiences find what they need faster
  • Ensure content is designed with the carbon footprint of each webpage in mind
  • Reducing need for carbon heavy transport by prioritising working with local crew when producing video content
  • Make environmentally conscious kit decisions when producing new content, such as using energy efficient equipment and reusing props and backdrops
  • Refine the website's data collection, analytics and tracking
  • Improve the efficiency of our website's code, reducing the energy needed to process it

About this page

This page is an example of low-carbon webpage design. It uses dark mode, which can reduce the power usage on smartphone or laptop OLED displays by 60-80% (when on maximum brightness). We’ve also kept this page free of decorative images. Lots of images on a page takes more energy to load, increasing the website’s carbon footprint.

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