Contrary to what you might think, turning on your computer or mobile and spending time browsing the internet is not a harmless activity. It has a large polluting load, but it depends heavily on websites. Not all of them emit the same amount of emissions into the atmosphere. Can we do something to avoid it? Not at the moment, since you will have to continue with your habits when consuming the internet. But at least we give you the opportunity to know which are the least environmentally friendly websites.
An extensive study carried out by WebSiteToolTester, with data collected from this website, yield surprising results. YouTube takes the cake in terms of CO2 emissions , since it emits 702 million kilos per year. This result is not by chance or because Google wants it to be contaminated. Think about the servers that have to use this site, with a huge amount of video information that is consulted at all times. It is a huge effort and results in such high emissions. Something similar happens with digital multimedia content platforms, such as Netflix or HBO. Every time you watch a series or a movie, the impact on the atmosphere is high. In any case, the figure is quite far from Google’s video platform, YouTube.
Curiously, the websites with pornographic video content are not very friendly to our environment either, since 2 of the most visited sites are very close to those of Netflix. In fact, the way these places work is usually very similar. Every time a visitor accesses content, a huge machine is set in motion, the servers themselves.
What curious data are there in this ranking?
The ultimate search engine ranks second on the list. To many it may seem that perhaps it should be in the first position, since we all use this search engine in a massive way. While Google ‘s homepage is fairly clean and loads quickly, which doesn’t penalize emissions, its ranking so high comes from the millions of hits it gets every day. What is a very friendly website and that has been designed not to contaminate more than it should, is dragged to that position by its volume of traffic.
Social networks are also in the objective of the study. Twitter is, by far, the most polluting, shedding a figure of 58 million kilos, while Facebook stays at 48. They are relatively heavy websites to load due to the large amount of content associated with them. On the contrary, Instagram is the social network that is less polluting, since it only produces 0.01 grams of carbon each time someone accesses its home page. Nothing is comparable with the 0.84 grams that Twitter emits for the same.
The Amazon website ranks fourth in the ranking of the most polluting websites, with emissions of 93 million kilos per year. The third place on the list is occupied by a page that was practically unknown before 2020, we are talking about Zoom, which you will surely have used to make video calls. With 114 million kilos of CO2 per year, one sixth of what YouTube generates, it shows us that certain activities when browsing the internet are not safe.
You are probably thinking that there is not much you can do to change these amounts. Maybe you think about it more when it comes to letting time go by looking at certain pages. But where your work really has an important specific weight is if you decide to create your own website. Choosing simple designs and in which page load times are not slow, will help to avoid generating more emissions than they should.
