carbon.txt

File Format
Name	Carbon.txt
Ontology	Electronic File Formats Web Carbon.txt
Extension(s)	.txt

Overview

carbon.txt is a proposed web standard for making it possible to verify that web-infrastructure uses green power, in lieu of green power, users of the standard will simply be able to see what type of power is being used by a hosting provider. The standard is designed to be chained from web-site to host to electricity provider, creating a graph of dependencies. A graph-like approach enables hosting-providers with other upstream hosting dependencies to link to those, and likewise, until an electricity provider is located.

File format example

Via carbon.txt simple example.

We assume a filename-based identification: carbon.txt

Content may look as follows:

# we assume most sites have one main provider which might provide the servers 
# used to serve content. If you know this, you can look up that provider's 
# carbon.txt file to make it possible to start walking the graph.

[Upstream Providers]

# while a website might rely on a single provider, it's common to rely on other 
# providers: google for analytics, or another CDN, and so on. Let's assume a 
# simple site is hosted just by one org for this example.

providers = [<URL for company>]

# That's all you need

References

carbon.txt proposed standard

See also

• The Green Web Foundation
• carbon.txt GitHub repository