The internet is often overlooked as a source of energy consumption, yet digital infrastructure accounts for a significant portion of global electricity use. Every image, video, and animation loaded onto a webpage requires energy to store, process, and display, increasing the environmental footprint of online platforms. On World Environment Day 2022, Ikea, a company deeply rooted in Swedish sustainability values, wanted to explore how digital consumption could be rethought in a way that makes a meaningful impact without compromising the user experience.

Reducing energy consumption doesn’t always require grand structural changes; sometimes, small adjustments at scale can have a substantial effect. One of the most energy-intensive elements of a website is its imagery. Ikea’s online catalog contains thousands of high-resolution product images, each requiring data storage and server processing power. The idea was to experiment with transforming these images into lightweight text-based representations, significantly decreasing the website’s digital weight and reducing energy consumption across its server infrastructure.

On June 5, 2022, the concept of the Sustainable Catalog was introduced—an innovative redesign of Ikea’s online catalog that replaced thousands of product images with ASCII art, an old-school technique of creating pictures from characters and symbols. This transformation dramatically reduced the amount of data loaded per page, decreasing energy use without altering the fundamental functionality of the website. By converting images into text, the catalog’s data size was reduced, decreasing the load on Ikea’s servers. With lighter web pages, the website required fewer server resources, leading to a measurable reduction in electricity use. The theoretical cost savings from lower energy consumption could be reinvested in sustainability projects, reinforcing Ikea’s commitment to innovation in digital sustainability.

The Sustainable Catalog concept demonstrated how small digital interventions could contribute to a more eco-friendly approach to web design. While the idea remains an exploration rather than an implemented reality, it offers a new way of thinking about the environmental impact of digital platforms and how companies can rethink their approach to online infrastructure in pursuit of greater sustainability.