Our Carbon Footprint

Hosting: Vercel

The website is hosted on Vercel, which is built around an energy-efficient, serverless architecture.

• 🌱On-demand compute: serverless functions spin up only when triggered and scale back to zero when idle, so energy use and emissions are far lower than always-on servers.
• 🌱Renewable-powered cloud: Vercel runs on AWS and Microsoft Azure, both of which have committed to powering their datacenters with 100% renewable energy.
• 🌱Global edge network: a CDN of 125+ points of presence caches and serves content close to each visitor, avoiding unnecessary multi-region compute.
• 🌱Measured impact: third-party estimates (CarbonRecycling.co.uk) put Vercel compute at about 0.000038 kgCO₂e per GB and Vercel transfer at about 0.000004 kgCO₂e per GB. Because this site is almost entirely cached and served as static files, most of its footprint is the data transfer when a page loads; server compute only runs at build time and when a place is added or changed.

Database: Google Cloud (europe-west1)

• 🌱Our database runs on Google Cloud in the europe-west1 region (Belgium).
• 🌱Google reports that region at 84% carbon-free energy (CFE), with a grid carbon intensity of 103 gCO₂eq/kWh, low enough for Google to flag it as a Low CO2 region (2024 data).
• 🌱The database is only contacted when a place is added or changed. Everyday browsing never touches it, so its energy use stays minimal.

How we keep it low

Most visits cost almost nothing, because almost nothing runs:

• 🌱Pages are pre-rendered and served from the global edge cache, so repeat visits need essentially zero server compute.
• 🌱The map is rebuilt only when a community submission actually changes the data (on-demand revalidation), not on every visit, so the database stays asleep the rest of the time.
• 🌱Images are optimised and delivered in modern formats at the size each device needs.