2022 Winner

CASE SUMMARY

Volkswagen is on a journey to make emissions-free mobility accessible to everyone through the reveal of their first sustainable, all-electric SUV. But with other automotive companies heavily promoting their own electric vehicles, they needed to do something unique to bring VW’s sustainability efforts to the forefront.

The internet has a surprisingly large carbon footprint and generates around 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, a 2020 survey showed that 73% of people were entirely unaware of this fact. But the less data embedded in online media, the less energy needed to transfer it over the web, resulting in a smaller carbon footprint. So, they set out to design a website that’s as carbon-efficient as Volkswagen’s
all-new electric vehicle.

They did the unthinkable for a car brand. They reduced Volkswagen’s website to almost nothing by removing all images and colour, creating the first sustainable web experience for an automotive company.

How? They removed every image from Volkswagen’s website and replaced them with over 1.5 million ASCII characters, meticulously coded to create the illusion of car photography. No JPEGs. No PNGs. Only live text, used to mimic photographic light and shadow.

This drastically reduced the amount of embedded data, transforming an industry-standard website into a significantly more sustainable one.

Then, they removed all colour, in favour of a stark black and white palette inspired by the energy efficiency of dark mode. They also applied a similar methodology behind the scenes, by streamlining code, stripping down JavaScript, subsetting fonts, and using
lighter frameworks.

This brought awareness to Volkswagen’s new all-electric SUV, while demonstrating tangible change. While design choices can impact usability, emotion, and aesthetics, their website transformation demonstrates that design can impact sustainability too.

The result? A website that’s 99% cleaner than over 2 million sites tested, generating only 0.022g of CO2 per page view (versus the average of 1.76g). This was validated via a full manual assessment by Website Carbon (third-party experts in digital sustainability), who factored in the proportion of desktop and mobile users, the carbon factor for national grid energy, and data centre/user locations. Based on 100,000 page views, their site now saves over 171,800g
of CO2 per month.

Since launching in January 2021, the Carbon-Neutral Net has been covered in 90+ media outlets worldwide and garnered over 27 million impressions with no paid media. Not only did they cut through the industry noise to promote Volkswagen’s all-new electric vehicle, but now site visitors can read all of VW’s sustainability-focussed content the way it was meant to be seen: in the most
carbon-efficient way possible.

Credits

Alexis Bronstorph
Chief Creative Officer – TYPE1/TAXI

Kelsey Horne
Chief Creative Officer - TYPE1/TAXI

Allen Kwong
Creative Director - TYPE1/TAXI

Zachary Richman
Copywriter - TYPE1/TAXI

Logan Franklin
Art Director - TYPE1/TAXI

Aurora Stewart de Pena
Strategy Director - TYPE1/TAXI

Atash Khosrorad
Account Director - TYPE1/Wunderman Thompson

Jessy Stark
Senior Project Manager - TYPE1/Wunderman Thompson

Rob Cimicata
Technology Director - TYPE1/Wunderman Thompson

Christine Tan
Developer - TYPE1/Wunderman Thompson

Jay Catalan
Developer - TYPE1/Wunderman Thompson

David Tang
Designer - TYPE1/TAXI

Ardit Hashimi
Designer - TYPE1/TAXI

Will Cuthbert
Designer - TYPE1/TAXI

Austin Parkin
Writer - TYPE1/TAXI

Michael Mehrasa
Writer - TYPE1/TAXI

Deema Kasem
Account Supervisor - TYPE1/Wunderman Thompson

Anna Dumke
Project Manager - TYPE1/Wunderman Thompson

Matthew Clemente
Product Manager - TYPE1/Wunderman Thompson

Kiana Ohori
Social Strategist - TYPE1/Wunderman Thompson

Michal Fetsum
Social Strategist - TYPE1/TAXI

Adrian Tudorache
Director Marketing Insights - TYPE1/Wunderman Thompson

Haipeng Wang
Data Scientist - TYPE1/Wunderman Thompson

Ken St. Germain
Data Scientist - TYPE1/Wunderman Thompson

Colin Rickatson
Email Manager - TYPE1/Wunderman Thompson

Hannah McGregor
Email Manager - TYPE1/Wunderman Thompson