The carbon footprint of streaming video is relatively small, especially in countries with low-carbon electricity
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Daniel Morgenstern's curator insight,
March 20, 2017 5:28 AM
"Le groupe californien assure qu'un seul Liam peut traiter 1,2 million d'iPhone 6 par an. Un chiffre à comparer aux 211 millions d'unités écoulés en 2016. « Pour 10 000 iPhones traités, le robot peut récupérer 190 kg d'aluminium, 80 de cuivre, 130 g d'or, 5,5 kg d'étain et 2,7 kg d'éléments terrestres rares » affirme Apple dans son rapport. Un premier effort qui en appelle d'autres pour recycler le milliard de smartphones de la marque vendus depuis 2007."
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The carbon footprint of streaming video depends first on the electricity usage, set out above, and then on the CO2 emissions associated with each unit of electricity generation.
As with other electricity end-uses, such as electric vehicles, this means that the overall footprint of streaming video depends most heavily on how the electricity is generated.
Powered by the global average electricity mix, streaming a 30-minute show on Netflix in 2019 released around 0.018kgCO2e (18 grammes, second bar in the chart, below). This is around 90-times less than the original 1.6kg figure from the Shift Project, and 11-times less than the “corrected” figure of 0.2kg.
The IEA estimate is also substantially lower than other estimates quoted in the media, including 22-times lower than the Despacito claim (cited on Channel 4, the BBC, Fortune, and Al Jazeera, assuming a global average grid mix) and 11-times lower than the claim by Save On Energy that 80 million views of Birdbox emitted 66ktCO2 (cited in the New Yorker, Euronews, Forbes, Die Welt, and the Daily Mail). My estimate of 36gCO2 per hour is over 2100-times lower than Marks et al. (2020) who estimated that 35 hours of HD video emits 2.68tCO2, or 77kgCO2 per hour.
To put it in context, my updated estimate for the average carbon footprint of a half-hour Netflix show is equivalent to driving around 100 metres in a conventional car.
But as the chart above shows, this figure depends heavily on the generation mix of the country in question. In France, where around 90% of electricity comes from low-carbon sources, the emissions would be around 2gCO2e, equivalent to 10 metres of driving.