Your Instagram activities cause more pollution than a single day of firing crackers for Diwali. Read below to find out how
This is regarding the ban on firing crackers and how celebrities have suddenly become single-day environmental activists. A typical monkey-see-monkey-do reaction has been adopted by the social media keyboard warriors trying to convince people not to firecrackers on Diwali by making 100 posts and stories on Instagram by quoting their favorite celebrities.
Hold that thought. Did you ever consider what your carbon footprint is annually? Forget annual carbon footprint, have you ever considered your contribution to climate change and pollution based on your daily activities? No. Why would you? You are an environmental activist who is trying to follow what the celebrity is saying, so you will post the same without a second thought.
Let me burst your bubble and educate you a little bit about what you are doing to this planet. Let’s talk about Instagram, the app which most of you are stuck with at least for a couple of hours a day.
I’m sure you have not thought of this, but I will continue to ask anyway – Did you ever think about how Instagram works? How does it store billions of images from all over the world and display whatever content you search for within seconds? All those overly edited photos of yourself, pretending to be something you are not, must be stored somewhere, isn’t it? Instagram is built using a Python web framework called Django. Without getting into much details about the architecture and how this immense data management is possible, il share a basic image of how it works below :
Basically, it takes a lot of resources to host your images and display them and these resources require a lot of power to run them without any downtime. So what does it have to do with your activities and their corresponding carbon footprint? Let’s talk numbers.
Carbon Footprint is the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere due to an activity. Below is an approximation of Instagram Activity vs CO2
| Instagram Activity | Carbon Footprint in grams of CO2 equivalent (gCO2e) per minute |
| Scrolling through News Feed | 1.55 |
| Viewing a Live Video | 0.72 |
| Hosting a Live Video | 0.62 |
| Posting a Story | 0.28 |
| Posting a Photo | 0.15 |
Scrolling through your Instagram news feed causes an emission of 1.55 grams per minute, which is equivalent to driving your car for 13 meters. Let us say that an average person scrolls through Instagram for 28 mins a day (I’m not talking about you, I know you spend more than 1++ hours on Instagram), it is equivalent to driving a car for 166 meters. There are 500 Million and counting users like yourself who use Instagram on daily basis. Adding the number of users and their usage per day and converting it to driving distance, it comes to approximately 83,000,000km/day, which is like driving around Earth in your car 2071 times in a single day!
A study done by CoreEcon in 2019 estimated that the weight of one of those overly edited, filtered, unbearable photo post on Instagram came to 2 MB. They used this information to calculate the power required to process this image and it came to 5.12 kWh. Instagram alone contributes 405 tCO2 annually.
And all these numbers doesn’t even include the power required to charge your phone, the online orders you make, the youtube videos you watch.
Fun fact: Watching an Ultra HD video on Netflix for 30mins will emit 1.6 Kg of CO2 which is like driving your car for 6.4 Km
Another Fun Fact: The World famous football player Cristiano Ronaldo‘s single post on Instagram consumed 36 megawatt-hours to deliver his content to his 240 Million followers in Nov 2020. [Compare that with the Percapita consumption of electricity in Bihar which is 311 kWh in 2019]
I think I have made my point. I am not against the ban on firecrackers. I don’t fire crackers myself, but I am guilty of scrolling through the Instagram newsfeed. Before you make absurd claims about firing crackers for a day on Diwali and how it is polluting the environment, use this article as a reference for you to understand that what you do every day is far worse for the environment.
Making social media posts to stop pollution is a huge irony.
By viewing this page, you caused an emission of approximately 4.6g of CO2 into the atmosphere. Sorry!
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
