Scrolling on social media is a big part of everyone’s life, no matter which generation you’re from. You do it in the train on the way to work, while you’re waiting for your lunch order at the mamak, when you’re sitting at home with nothing to do. You literally NEVER. GET. OFF. SOCIAL. MEDIA.
It seems like a super harmless thing to do that you can afford to do it all day, but did you know that just by scrolling on social media, you’re releasing carbon emissions every minute?
Here’s the stats of carbon emissions released for each social media:
- One Instagram post or video: ~0.15 - 0.25g
- Per minute of use: ~2.91g
- Annual per user (average): ~28.9kg
TikTok
- One TikTok post or video: ~2.6 – 3.0g
- Per minute of use: ~2.92g
- Annual per user (average): ~48.5kg
- One Facebook post: ~0.2 – 0.3g
- Per minute of use: ~2.91g
- Annual per user: ~28.9kg
X (Twitter)
- Per tweet: ~0.2g
- Per minute of use: ~2.0g
- Annual per user (based on 30min/day): ~21.9kg
YouTube
- One YouTube video (~5 minutes): ~4.6g
- Per minute of use: ~2.92g
- Annual per user: ~40.2kg
Spotify
- Per minute: ~0.02g
- Annual per user (based on 30min/day): ~191.5g
Assuming you spend half an hour on all six social media platforms daily, you’re releasing 410.4g of carbon emissions every day just by being online!
This also equates to 149kg of carbon emissions yearly!
All this just by being online! However, it’s not the scrolling or usage of social media itself that releases carbon emissions, but rather the energy that’s being used for data storage, transmission, and processing in the content that we see every day.
Social media that are more focused on video streaming and are engagement-driven, such as Tik Tok and YouTube require more energy compared to other platforms like Spotify, which is more efficient as audio streaming requires less data and energy to run it’s processes.
While the carbon emissions may not be large based on a single user, the real risk we should be focused on is its collective emissions based on the millions of active users on each platform every day. Other than reducing our chronic online habits, there’s not much we can do to reduce emissions as social media is now culturally integrated into our daily lives, and reducing social media intake will take decades to be effective, if it’s even possible.
What we can do, is try to use more efficient apps whenever possible, such as using Spotify to listen to music rather than Youtube or Tik Tok if we’re not keen on watching music videos. It might be a micro-habit, but just by reducing even 3g of carbon emissions daily, you can reduce 1kg of carbon emissions from your own habits.
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