KOCHI: "Having the entire family at home for a year has definitely spiked our power bills,” said Anjana Chandran, a techie from Kochi, when I asked her about the family budget during the lockdown.
While the entire world was celebrating how much air and water quality improved during the lockdown, it thought too little about the damage caused by tiny screens we carry around in our pockets all day — the mobile phones and the applications that make them interesting.
An independent study conducted by Greenspector, an energy company specialising in energy-resource efficiency, revealed some shocking statistics regarding our ‘doomsday scrolling’ trends.
While the environmental impact of mining cryptocurrency has been discussed before, that of social media usage has hardly made the headlines.
Greenspector studied the carbon impact, consumption of energy and data exchanged across 10 popular social media platforms across the world — Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube.
Carbon footprint
When India banned TikTok, most of its users were enranged. But if you consider the carbon footprint being generated globally by this video app, you wouldn’t feel so bad about it.
TikTok generates around 2.63 gEqCO2 per minute — carbon footprint equivalent to using 0.27 liters of water or 1.88 m² of land! Reddit, our go-to place for memes and life advice, is at a close second, generating 2.48 gEqCO2 per minute — carbon footprint equivalent to using 0.23 liters of water or 1.35 m² of land.
Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat take the next three places, followed by Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. YouTube is on the bottom cap of carbon emission, generating only 0.46 gEqCO2 per minute.
Now, think this through. The Global Web Index from July 2021 states that a person spends an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes on social networks.
This is two minutes more than the figure from 2019. If we use the above statistics to check the carbon footprint emitted by users on a day across these 10 apps, the figure is roughly equivalent to travelling 1.4 km in a light vehicle!
Data usage
“I remember how two or three years ago, a 1GB plan used to last me a week! Now it hardly lasts me half a day!,” said Navya Chandran, a BCom student who spends a lot of time perfecting Instagram reels.
She has a point, the amount of data consumed and used by social media platforms has increased over the years. Interestingly, Reddit is the top scorer in this department — over 100MB is transferred by the app’s newsfeed every minute you scroll it.
Instagram is in the fourth position — 32.46 MB is exchanged every minute. Facebook is in seventh place with 11.15 MB, and YouTube is the model student once again — a modest 3.09 MB. Reddit consumes 32 times more data than YouTube, and this is 71% more than the app used in 2020.
Now, this is how this can be heavy on your pockets. If you are on Instagram for around 50 minutes a day, you consume around 51 GB per month! And if you are still a fan of Facebook (that’s rare nowadays), you consume nearly 19 GB by surfing the app for around an hour every day.
Energy consumption
Tiktok is on the bad side here too — consuming 15.81 mAh per minute when someone scrolls. This is followed by Facebook, Snapchat and Reddit.
Once again, YouTube is a good samaritan, consuming only 8.58 mAh per minute, and they haven’t stepped up their energy use from last year. Instagram is second last, at 8.9 mAh consumption every minute.
But according to Greenspector, they have stepped up their energy usage by five points as compared to last year.