A software company does not pollute with smoke: it pollutes with compute. And the compute that weighs most is usually the compute nobody looks at, because it costs little per unit and repeats a great deal.
Technical efficiency is sustainability
A page that weighs half consumes half on every visit, on every device, for years. That is not a metaphor: it is the one environmental lever a product team has direct control over.
It is also why we chase page weight and not only perceived speed. When we found this site was shipping every translation catalogue to the browser on every page, the home went from 420 KB to 156 KB — and that difference is saved on every visit by every person, not once.
Infrastructure the size of the problem
Our site and several of our services run on a single European machine. That is not austerity: provisioning for a peak that never arrives burns energy for the entire time it does not arrive. We wrote about it, trade-offs included, in depending on someone else's cloud.
The horizon changes the decision
Building for ten years forces different decisions than building for the next demo: fewer dependencies, standard formats, and systems someone can still understand much later. What lasts gets replaced less, and not replacing is the cheapest way not to spend.