Amy Kitcher — Sustainability

Amy is committed to reducing the environmental impact of this website and to reporting its estimated carbon footprint openly and accurately.

What this statement covers

This statement covers the estimated operational emissions of amykitcher.com: the energy used to serve its pages and to load them on a visitor’s device. It does not cover the emissions of building the site, or of the equipment and services Amy uses in her wider work.

Hosting

The site is a static website hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Cloudflare is listed as a green provider in the Green Web Foundation’s directory. That listing reflects evidence supplied by the provider about its energy sourcing rather than an independent audit of it.

As a conscious consumer, Amy wrote to Cloudflare’s Impact team on 4th September 2026, with a set of questions arising from its 2025 Impact Report and 2024 Emissions Inventory, covering the composition of its historical offset portfolio, how its renewable-energy matching divides between power-purchase agreements and unbundled certificates, the exclusion of colocation facility electricity and cooling water from its reporting boundary, and the status of its Science Based Targets initiative commitment. The full text of her letter is published here: Letter to Cloudflare. Site owners who would like to put similar questions to their own hosts are welcome to reuse the letter.

Sustainable design

The website consists of lightweight static pages built with straightforward HTML and CSS. It does not use analytics, tracking scripts, social-media widgets, external fonts, or plugins.

Images are served in WebP format, appropriately resized and given explicit width and height attributes. Most images are lazy-loaded. Two above-the-fold images are loaded eagerly instead, because their immediate appearance is part of the intended first impression of the page.

Fonts are self-hosted, and all animation respects visitors’ reduced-motion preferences. Together these measures reduce unnecessary data transfer and processing while preserving the site’s visual character, accessibility, and usability.

Estimated carbon emissions

Website emissions cannot currently be measured directly with complete precision. Online carbon calculators produce modelled estimates, and their results vary according to their methodologies and assumptions.

Both tests below were run on 4th September 2026.

Carbon Calculator gave the site a carbon rating of B. At 10,000 monthly page views it estimated approximately 13.91 kg CO₂e over a year, equivalent to roughly 0.116 g CO₂e per page view. Website Carbon applies version 4 of the Sustainable Web Design Model.

Ecograder gave the site an overall sustainability grade of C. This is a composite score covering performance, user experience, and green hosting alongside estimated carbon, rather than a carbon rating on its own. Ecograder estimated 0.46 g CO₂e per page load, which at 10,000 monthly page loads would be approximately 55.2 kg over a year.

The figure of 10,000 page views per month is illustrative, and not this site’s actual traffic. In the next statement update, data on actual page views per month will be available.

The two carbon estimates above differ by roughly a factor of four. This is expected rather than contradictory: Website Carbon uses the Sustainable Web Design Model, while Ecograder uses its own scoring method, so the two are not directly comparable. The gap is a useful illustration of why these figures are estimates.

Both models also draw a boundary around the emissions they count. Neither captures the cooling, lighting, and power conversion overheads of the facilities in which a host’s equipment sits, which is one of the matters raised in the letter above. The real figure is likely to be higher than either estimate rather than lower.

These are modelled estimates, not direct measurements. They are included to give a transparent indication of the site’s likely impact rather than a definitive carbon account. The links above lead to live tools whose results may change over time.

Carbon offsetting

Amy has purchased and retired 0.83 tonnes CO₂e through Offset Britain Ltd (registered in England and Wales, company number 05593179) under certificate number OB-SS-2026-001107. The certificate can be checked through Offset Britain’s verification page. Offset Britain retires credits from the relevant registry on the purchaser’s behalf. This offset is allocated solely to this website and is not counted against any other emissions.

At the higher Ecograder estimate and the illustrative figure of 10,000 monthly page views, 0.83 tonnes is approximately fifteen times the site’s projected annual emissions. Measured against actual traffic the margin is substantially larger. The over-provision is deliberate, to allow for the uncertainty in the underlying estimates and for the facility overheads the models exclude.

Amy has not commissioned an independent assessment of the website’s emissions, nor sought independent certification that the website is carbon neutral. She therefore does not describe it as a carbon-neutral website. On the basis of the estimates above, she believes the offset purchased comfortably exceeds the website’s likely emissions for the twelve months from the date of purchase.

Offsetting is not a substitute for reducing emissions at source. It is used here alongside the design measures described above, which are intended to keep the site’s underlying impact low.

Continuing improvement

Amy will retest the website and review this statement at least annually, and sooner following any substantial change to its design or content. She will continue to look for opportunities to reduce data transfer and energy use without diminishing accessibility, usability or the experience of visitors.