Carbonlite — Website Carbon Footprint

About

Carbonlite measures the real-time carbon footprint of every website you visit and gives developers actionable recommendations to build a cleaner web.

  🌿 HOW IT WORKS
  Carbonlite uses the Sustainable Web Design Model (SWDM v4) to calculate CO2 emissions based on:
  • Data transferred (images, scripts, CSS, fonts)
  • Hosting type (green vs standard data center)
  • Network and device energy consumption
  • Embodied carbon from hardware manufacturing

  📊 FEATURES
  • Real-time carbon grade (A+ to F) for every page
  • Resource breakdown by type (images, JS, CSS, fonts)
  • Industry benchmark comparison (e-commerce, blog, SaaS, news)
  • Actionable fix recommendations with estimated savings
  • 7-day trend tracking per domain
  • Carbon budget alerts
  • Green hosting detection via Green Web Foundation (opt-in)
  • Dark mode support
  • Export history as JSON

  🔒 PRIVACY-FIRST
  • All data stored locally on your device — never sent to our servers
  • Green hosting check is opt-in and sends only hostnames (not full URLs)
  • No tracking, analytics, or telemetry
  • No personal data collected
  • Incognito mode fully respected — zero data persisted in private windows

  🎯 BUILT FOR DEVELOPERS
  Carbonlite is designed for web developers who want to understand and reduce the environmental impact of their websites. Unlike consumer carbon trackers, Carbonlite provides:
  • Per-resource breakdown with file-level detail
  • Copy-paste optimization checklists
  • Format-specific image compression suggestions
  • Third-party script impact analysis
  • New vs returning visitor comparison

  📐 METHODOLOGY
  Based on the Sustainable Web Design Model v4 (sustainablewebdesign.org):
  • Energy model: Data center (0.055 kWh/GB) + Network (0.059) + Device (0.080)
  • Grid intensity: 480 gCO2e/kWh global average (Ember 2023), with 11 regional options
  • Embodied carbon: +16% for hardware manufacturing
  • Green hosting: 50 gCO2e/kWh for renewable-powered data centers

  🔧 PERMISSIONS EXPLAINED
  • sidePanel: Display the carbon analysis UI
  • storage: Save settings and history locally on your device
  • tabs: Identify Chrome internal pages and respect Incognito privacy
  • webNavigation: Detect page loads for automatic analysis
  • Content script: Collect resource sizes via Performance API (no page content is read)
  • thegreenwebfoundation.org: Green hosting check (opt-in only, disabled by default)

  Questions? Report issues at github.com/rapidminds-tech/carbonlite