The UK comparison website, Compare the Market, has launched a new calculator that allows you to find out how much carbon you’re emitting when using social media websites. All you have to do is tell the calculator how many minutes you spend per day on each of the services it lists and it will add up your total emissions per day and year.
The services and their emissions are as follows:
| Rank | Application | Emissions per minute (gCO₂Eq) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | TikTok | 2.63 |
| 2 | 2.48 | |
| 3 | 1.30 | |
| 4 | 1.05 | |
| 5 | Snapchat | 0.87 |
| 6 | 0.79 | |
| 7 | 0.71 | |
| 8 | 0.60 | |
| 9 | Twitch | 0.55 |
| 10 | YouTube | 0.46 |
Commenting on the new calculator, Brett Mifsud, General Manager of Energy at Compare the Market, said:
“Whilst a quick scroll of Facebook won’t cause major damage to the environment, spending 5 minutes on each of the ten main social media platforms every day equates to over 20kg of carbon a year, equal to driving 84.5km (52.5 miles), which can do significantly more damage, especially considering the number of social media users across the planet.”
While finding out your social media impact can be important, it definitely isn’t the first thing you should be looking at when it comes to reducing emissions. The average American has a carbon footprint of 15.52 tonnes and the biggest contributors to this score are things such as how you travel, what you eat, and how you heat your home.
Compare the Market said that the average emissions per minute for each app were sourced from Greenspector findings and were measured on a Galaxy S7 smartphone. Hopefully, someone from TikTok and Reddit sees these figures and formulates a plan to reduce their emissions.