From a Volkswagen Canada communiqué.
Websites play a crucial role in the automotive purchase journey, but our combined online activity—from web visits, to search activity, to video streaming—is also responsible for about 4% of all global CO2 emissions.
As part of its “Be the Change” corporate social responsibility initiative, Volkswagen Canada is temporarily powering down its full website this Earth Day to raise awareness of sustainability efforts worldwide.
Visitors to VW.ca will be greeted by a landing page featuring a specially coded image of the upcoming all-electric ID.Buzz, which arrives in Canada in 2024, rendered using only ASCII text characters.
“As part of our Be The Change platform, we have goals to be a fully carbon-neutral company by 2050, and on our journey to get there, we know that every action counts,” said Lynne Piette, Head of Marketing at Volkswagen Canada. “So, this Earth Day we’re powering down our entire site to raise awareness about the Internet’s digital carbon footprint, while also reducing ours—and planting a tree on Canadian soil for every visit on the day to maximize our offsets.”
The carbon-efficient page will generate up to 93% less CO2 emissions than a standard website. To further demonstrate its commitment to building a more sustainable planet, Volkswagen Canada is also partnering with One Tree Planted—a global organization focused on global reforestation—to plant one tree in Canada for every visitor to its site.
The “Day to Zero” campaign is a follow-up to last year’s highly successful Earth Day initiative “The Carbon Neutral Net,” in which Volkswagen replaced text and images on a section of its sites with ASCII text characters. The result was a browsing experience cleaner than 99% of the over two million websites measured by digital carbon emissions calculator Website Carbon.