Wasteback Machine is an open-source method for measuring the size and composition of web pages as they once were, using the copies preserved in web archives.

The web is ephemeral. Pages are revised, replaced and deleted, usually without trace, and the tools that estimate a website’s environmental impact can examine only what exists today. Its past is thus left unmeasured, and with it any sense of how the present came to be. Wasteback Machine reads web archives as proxy records of the web’s material history and records the conditions under which each page was captured. The result is a historical baseline. Against it, today’s digital footprint appears not as a neutral starting point but as the product of decades of accumulated growth. The method thus makes the cumulative growth of the web visible, measurable and open to scrutiny.