Based on a press release from Volkswagen Canada.
Websites play a major role in the motorists’ buying journey. However, all of our online activities combined (from web visits to search activities to video streaming) are also responsible for about 4% of all global carbon dioxide emissions.
As part of its “Let’s Be the Bend” social responsibility initiative, Volkswagen Canada has temporarily shut down its entire website for Earth Day. The goal is to raise awareness of sustainability efforts worldwide.
visitors from Volkswagen K You will be greeted with a unique page containing a specially encrypted image of the new identifier. 100% Electric Buzz, coming to Canada in 2024. This experience will be generated using ASCII text characters only.
“Through our Let’s Be the Turn platform, we aim to be a completely carbon-neutral company by 2050,” explains Lynne Piette, Marketing Director of Volkswagen Canada. “This is why on Earth Day, we are decommissioning our entire site to increase awareness of the internet’s digital carbon footprint, while also reducing our footprint. We will also plant a tree for each site visit during the day in order to maximize our actions.”
The low carbon page will generate up to 93% less carbon dioxide emissions than standard sites. To demonstrate its commitment to building a more sustainable planet, Volkswagen Canada is also partnering with One Tree Planted (a global organization focused on reforestation) to plant a tree in Canada on every visit to their site.
The “Day Zero” campaign is a follow-up to last year’s highly successful Earth Day initiative, “The Carbon Neutral Site,” in which Volkswagen replaced text and images on a section of its site with ASCII characters. The result was a browsing experience that was more environmentally friendly than 99% of the more than two million websites measured by the website’s digital carbon footprint calculator.
