What about individual websites?

[fershad]

This issue has been created to track future discussion on how the carbon.txt specification can be adopted by individual website owners for their own sites.

[TheBoatyMcBoatFace]

I've added carbon.txt to my own website. https://bentleyhensel.com/carbon.txt
Yes, I know, technically, it is not allowed.

This site is running via a Docker container on a Dell R730.

I see two approaches here for self-hosted websites =

1. Generate a power profile of the hardware along with the greeness of electricity used to run hardware.
   I think this option is probably the smallest lift, but results won't be able to be validated.

2. Assuming Docker in use: Run a validation/verification/profiling tool/script that calculates the carbon impact of the website based on the container resource usage. This is then used to generate a "green score," which is recorded in carbon.txt.
   Things get tricky with distributed/Kubernetes, but if we approach it like Prometheus metrics, it should be doable. The hard part is figuring out the resource usage in such a way that it accounts for 1. hardware effectiveness and 2. other services running on said hardware.

I started this a while ago and carbon.txt reminded me about it. Basically, the thought with this was to get power info from a local machine and store in SQlite db and then send to a centralized reporting API that then feeds into something like Cloud Carbon Footprint.

[fershad]

@TheBoatyMcBoatFace thanks for this. Those are some interesting ideas, which we'll keep in mind when we get around to this. At the moment, our main push with this project will be focusing at the hosting provider level of the stack. We're currently reviewing the carbon.txt syntax, and what/how things are exposed.

One reason we don't encourage individual websites to adopt this just yet is that it currently requires that they are registered with us (Green Web Foundation) as a verified provider. Reviewing verification requests is a manual process, and as a small team we wouldn't have the bandwidth to cope with the number of verification requests we'd receive from individual sites.

However, in your case if you contact us via our support form we can help take you through the process of getting verified so that Greenchecks run against your website are returned based on the content of your carbon.txt file.