If you’re trying to build a more sustainable wardrobe, then you’ll probably be interested to know which online high-street brands are more environmentally-friendly than others (and if you want to live a more conscious life overall, do check out our sustainability content here).

A new study by USwitch might be able to help you with that. The energy switching website looked at each company’s carbon footprint, based on online visits to their websites.

Basically, according to the site, everything we do online uses electricity, from sending emails and streaming content, to internet shopping and posting content on social media. This then produces carbon which negatively affects the environment and can lead to climate change.

Using a website carbon calculator, they worked out the amount of energy that’s used when someone loads a page on a website – this factors in the energy that’s required at the data centre (the cloud), by the telecoms network and by the user’s computer or mobile, as well as things like whether the data centre is using green energy to power it.

These were the winners.

Top 10 Cleanest Fashion Websites:

Carbon expert, Tom Greenwood from Website Carbon commented: ‘Improving energy efficiency and prioritising renewable energy sources are two key ways a website can reduce its carbon emissions. A good place to start is making sure the size of images, fonts and videos are kept to an absolute minimum – this will reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred when someone uses the site, and will in turn reduce the amount of energy used. Reducing website emissions might sound a bit niche, but there’s a stack of other benefits for the customer as well as the company – from improved user experience to better security, better accessibility and faster load times. So, it’s a win-win for people and planet.’

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