Environmental Impact: Tokens Saved to CO₂ Avoided

How SuperCompress translates tokens saved into GPU-seconds avoided, watt-hours, and estimated CO₂ — and the assumptions behind the numbers.

SuperCompress reduces the number of tokens that reach your LLM’s KV cache prefill step. Fewer tokens means less GPU work, less energy consumed, and lower CO₂ emissions for the exact same workflow. The learned eviction policy runs on CPU in sub-millisecond time before any GPU inference begins, so the overhead of compression is negligible compared to the prefill cost it avoids on long contexts.

The figures produced by SuperCompress’s metrics module are illustrative estimates, not live per-deployment measurements. All assumptions are explicit and documented so you can adjust them for your hardware and grid. Do not present these numbers as measured carbon accounting without independent verification.

What we measure

Every compression call produces an original_tokens and kept_tokens value. The sustainability module converts the difference into an energy and emissions estimate using a simple linear model:

Metric	Definition
Tokens saved	original_tokens − kept_tokens per compression call
KV savings %	(1 − kept / original) × 100
GPU-seconds avoided	Effective tokens saved ÷ throughput (tokens/sec)
Wh saved	GPU-seconds avoided × GPU watts ÷ 3,600
CO₂ avoided	Wh saved × grid intensity (kg/kWh) ÷ 1,000

Only the KV context portion of prefill is attributed to savings (controlled by kv_share_of_prefill). This avoids over-claiming: embedding lookup, attention over new tokens, and other prefill work are excluded.

Default assumptions

The defaults are defined in supercompress/benchmarks/metrics.py as a frozen dataclass so every estimate is fully reproducible and traceable:

Parameter	Default	Rationale
tokens_per_gpu_second	2,500	7B-class prefill on a consumer GPU (e.g. RTX 3090)
gpu_watts	150 W	Typical single-GPU sustained draw during inference
kv_share_of_prefill	55%	Only the context/KV portion is attributed to savings
grid_kg_co2_per_kwh	0.417	US average grid intensity (EIA 2023)

You can override any of these by constructing a custom SustainabilityAssumptions object and passing it to sustainability_from_tokens_saved().

Python API

Use sustainability_from_tokens_saved() to compute an estimate for any number of tokens saved:

from supercompress import compress_context
from supercompress.benchmarks.metrics import (
    SustainabilityAssumptions,
    sustainability_from_tokens_saved,
)

# Compress a context passage
result = compress_context(
    "Your long document or log output here...",
    "What does fetch return?",
    budget_ratio=0.35,
)

# Calculate sustainability impact
tokens_saved = result.original_tokens - result.kept_tokens
impact = sustainability_from_tokens_saved(tokens_saved)

print(f"Tokens saved:        {impact.tokens_saved:,}")
print(f"GPU-seconds avoided: {impact.gpu_seconds_avoided:.4f}")
print(f"Wh saved:            {impact.watt_hours_saved:.6f}")
print(f"CO₂ avoided (kg):    {impact.co2_kg_avoided:.8f}")

# Inspect the assumptions used
print(impact.assumptions.to_dict())

To use custom hardware assumptions — for example, a datacenter GPU at higher wattage or a greener grid:

custom = SustainabilityAssumptions(
    tokens_per_gpu_second=5_000,   # A100-class GPU
    gpu_watts=400,                  # Higher TDP
    grid_kg_co2_per_kwh=0.233,     # EU grid average
    kv_share_of_prefill=0.55,
)

impact = sustainability_from_tokens_saved(tokens_saved, assumptions=custom)
print(impact.to_dict())

Scale example

At 1 million compressions with approximately 800 tokens saved per run:

• 800 million tokens avoided from GPU prefill
• ~29 kWh of GPU energy saved (default assumptions)
• ~12 kg CO₂ avoided (US grid average)

These numbers scale linearly — 10M compressions avoids roughly 120 kg CO₂, comparable to driving a petrol car about 500 km.

Use the Projection calculator on the SuperCompress website (#impact) to adjust compression volume, tokens-per-run, and grid intensity interactively without writing any code.

Honesty guidance for submissions and reports

When citing SuperCompress sustainability metrics in papers, demos, or hackathon submissions, follow these principles to avoid misleading claims:

1. State assumptions clearly — quote the SustainabilityAssumptions values used; do not present estimates as live metering.
2. Report quality alongside savings — token reduction without answer quality data is not a fair comparison. Use answer_quality_score() or an equivalent evaluation.
3. Scope the claim correctly — SuperCompress targets edge-CPU policy inference and measurable KV cache reduction, not datacenter-wide carbon accounting.