Case study / Material Focus
Recycle Your ElectricalsA more sustainable website
How a change of web host made a busy campaign website faster, cut its hosting bill by £500 a year and reduced its estimated carbon emissions by more than 90%.
Fix · Donate · Sell · Recycle
90%+
lower estimated hosting emissions
£500
saved each year on hosting
+61%
desktop Lighthouse performance
+20%
mobile Lighthouse performance
The clientMaterial Focus is the independent not-for-profit behind the national Recycle Your Electricals campaign. Its website reaches over three million visitors a year.
The campaign helps people across the UK fix, donate, sell and recycle their old electricals. Its locator lists around 30,000 drop-off points, with the goal of putting everyone within a 15-minute walk of one. The scale of that work makes the website's own impact matter.
Tim Rabjohns
Digital Lead, Material Focus
The challenge
The website was part of the footprint
E-waste is one of the UK's fastest-growing waste streams. Only around 30% of the country has kerbside electrical recycling. Around £1 billion of electricals sits unused in what the team calls the "drawer of doom".
Material Focus asks the public to think about the impact of their electricals. Nobody had yet asked the same question about their own websites. Tim Rabjohns met us at a green software meetup run by the Silicon Brighton network. It got him thinking about hosting, servers and where the electricity comes from.
“When you look at it that way, the website becomes one of the biggest carbon contributors in the organisation.”
Tim Rabjohns / Digital Lead, Material Focus
Like most organisations, Material Focus had chosen its hosting on price and service alone. Its previous host shared no energy or carbon data. Without real data, any green claim is a guess.
Most web carbon calculators work top-down. They take global energy estimates and divide them coarsely by overall segment activity (e.g. data on the internet). That gives you a number, but it can't show which parts of a site use the most energy, or what to change.
What we did
Start with what the site actually needs
Our founding pledge is simple: never profit from digital waste. Many hosts are paid more when sites run oversized servers that sit idle. We do the opposite.
- 01
Audit the sites
We ran a Digital Emissions Audit. We reviewed the sites, asked a lot of questions and spoke to the existing host to understand what was really going on.
- 02
Measure from the bottom up
Our CWM model measures energy use from what actually happens across servers, networks and visitors' devices, including real journeys such as searching for a drop-off point. That shows where energy goes, not just an average.
- 03
Right-size and streamline
We matched server resources to real traffic, so the site no longer pays for capacity it doesn't use. We tuned how pages and assets are delivered, so each visit needs less processing and data.
- 04
Move and support the team
In December 2025 we migrated the sites to our low-carbon hosting and supported the team while everything bedded in.
“It wasn't surface-level. It didn't feel like a challenge. It was more like, if you're thinking this way, here's how you take it further.”
Tim Rabjohns / Digital Lead, Material Focus
The results
Faster, greener and cheaper
Over four months, estimated hosting emissions fell from 63 kg to 6 kg. The annual hosting bill is more than 14% lower, and desktop pages now load in under a second.
Lighthouse performance rose from 59 to 95 on desktop and from 59 to 71 on mobile. Accessibility improved too, from 86 to 95 on desktop and 92 to 99 on mobile, measured against the WCAG standard.
Most importantly, the team now has a clear view of its digital carbon footprint.
Carbon figures are estimates for four months from June to October on our platform. The previous host gave no data, so we used reference servers and industry-average utilisation for the before figure, a deliberately low-end estimate. Our own figures use a transparent method aligned to ISO/IEC 21031. Lighthouse scores compare tests before (9 December 2025) and after the hosting change.
The relationship
Good work starts with a conversation
Material Focus came to us through a community event, not a pitch. Tim first met the team at one of our green software meetups, which we run through the Silicon Brighton network with no commercial return in mind. For Tim, that said a lot about why we do this work.
“It feels like they're doing it because they genuinely care about it.”
Tim Rabjohns / Digital Lead, Material Focus
We're a small team, so Material Focus worked directly with the people doing the work, from the first audit questions to the migration itself. We spoke to the previous host on their behalf and explained what we found in plain terms. When something needed sorting after the move, we were on it, including outside normal hours.
“They've been responsive, even outside normal hours when something needed sorting, which has been reassuring.”
Tim Rabjohns / Digital Lead, Material Focus
“Commercially, it's a win. Faster, greener and cheaper is a pretty strong combination.”
Tim Rabjohns / Digital Lead, Material Focus
What comes next
Real data to work with
As an environmental organisation, Material Focus now looks at its own systems as well as what it asks of others. Tim has learned a lot about how digital infrastructure links to environmental impact, and plans to share that more widely.
Its team now has statistics on energy use and emissions across the supply chain, from end user to data centre, and across manufacturing, operations and end of life. That means carbon data it can use in reports, tenders and conversations with partners, with a clear method behind every number.
“Start with a conversation. Then do an audit. It doesn't cost much, and it gives you real data to work with.”
Tim Rabjohns / Digital Lead, Material Focus
We build software, sustainably.