Digital technology companies could reduce the carbon footprint of services like You Tube by changing how they are designed, experts say.
Human-Computer Interaction researchers from the University of Bristol looked at how much electric energy was used to provide YouTube videos to people globally in 2016, to enable them to estimate the service’s carbon footprint in that year.
Their analysis showed it was around 10Mt CO2e (Million Metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent) – approximately that of a city the size of Glasgow.
These carbon emissions result from servers and networking devices streaming about 1bn hours of YouTube video to user devices each day.
Read more at University of Bristol
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