Our eco-design approach

The third largest urban transport operator in the world, a major player in sustainable mobility alongside cities and regions, the RATP group has a new eco-designed website in line with its CSR policy and its digital sobriety program to limit its carbon impact by reducing its CO² emissions.

A sustainable website with low energy consumption

Digital technologies tip the scale of energy consumption, and that’s more than a simple metaphor.

To reduce energy expenses related to the storage of our pages on servers and users visiting them, we have adopted an approach that aims to lighten their weight in bytes as much as possible. To this end, the photos published on our website are all processed with a reduced number of pixels, and videos are selected with limited use. We have opted for simple and refined designs.

In addition, we have made technical choices regarding development and coding to limit data flows between the website and the servers that host it.

Finally, the itineraries are optimised; contents such as news articles, press releases/press kits have a limited lifespan of 6 months.

An eco-responsible website

Since the website’s creation, we have implemented a all-encompassing strategy to restrict its energy and resource consumption. Our approach is based on the following principles :

  • Limiting high-consumption content:
    We have limited the number of media files (images, videos, PDFs) present on each page and specifically compressed each image to a set number of pixels.
  • Optimising loading time:
    Reducing the weight of pages and optimising code to decrease the amount of server requests, thus reducing loading time.
  • A site that consumes less energy:
    We have developed the website to make it more efficient and limit its weight on servers, thus reducing its energy consumption.
  • A strict operation:
    We have reduced the number of pages on our website and included simplified itineraries for users.
  • Videos that don’t play automatically:
    We have banned the concept of videos playing automatically. Videos only play when users want to watch them to limit the website’s energy consumption.
  • Greener hosting:
    Our website is hosted by the Greenshift company, a French company created in 2010 that specialises in sustainable (greener) hosting thanks to a data centre located in the Netherlands.

About the data centre:

  • It uses close to 100% renewable energy and has a neutral CO2 balance;
  • It uses a cooling system based on free cooling (natural temperature exchange) to reduce overall consumption;
  • It is combined with a DELTA conversion inverter.

EcoIndex score: how does it work?

The EcoIndex* score measures the environmental performance of web pages based on the same concept as energy ratings that can be found on appliances: a score from A to G or 0 to 100%. We use the Green IT tools to rate each page. A score is given to each page.

Using a page’s address (or URL), the score is based on three technical criteria:

  • The complexity of the page’s composition (i.e. Number of DOM – Document Object Model – elements) gives an overview of the energy needed for the browser to display it to the user;
  • The weight of data transferred in kB, which determines the energy necessary to transport contents from the server to the browser.
  • The number of HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) requests that the browser needs to send to the server.

*The Ecoindex tool available on the Ecoindex.fr website is offered under a Creative Commons CC-By-NC-ND license. This means that everyone can use it, provided that they attribute the source of the obtained data – EcoIndex.fr – and include a link to the service http://ecoindex.fr. It is not permitted for commercial use or modification.

RATP Group and the energy transition By 2025, RATP Group has set to halve its greenhouse gas emissions and reduce its energy consumption per passenger-kilometre by 20%, compared with benchmark year 2015. The Group has signed the EcoWatt charter and is committed to carrying out a sustainable energy and environmental transition through a plan based on 8 major measures. Discover the program