It’s easy to forget just how important social media sites such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are to our daily lives these days, keeping us connected to our friends and family and up to date with what’s going on in the world.
But, just like all the other technology that we use, they have an environmental footprint too. And while a quick scroll through your feed or the odd YouTube video isn’t going to use up too much energy, over the course of a year things can start to add up, especially when you consider just how many people use these social media sites across the world.
So, how does your own social media usage compare? Estimate how many times you use each social media site below to see how your footprint could look over the course of a year.
XXgCO₂Eq per day | XXgCO₂Eq per year
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The average emissions per minute (shown in grams of CO₂ equivalent) for each app were sourced from Greenspector and were measured on a Galaxy S7 smartphone.
The social media carbon footprint calculator works by taking your number of minutes spent on each social media site and multiplying them by the estimated emissions per minute for that site, before multiplying the daily figure by 365 to calculate the annual footprint.