You dirty Skype polluter!!

General Electric has launched the other day “How much CO2 is created by…”, an application on their website created by designer David McCandless, where you can calculate the amount of emissions produced by simply daily routines. 

It seems in fact that Skype produces more CO2 emissions than Facebook (24 million tons/year against “just” 13.6 million tons). 


Here are some other curious data taken from this application:

TV: 1 Hour in front of a 15” tv produces 34 gr of CO2, 76 gr if you are using a 28”.

If you like to go big, as on a 42” plasma screen, you produce 220 gr per hour; (I’m in the middle so I don’t feel that guilty).

Phone: 1 minute of phonecall can be free on your operator but provides 57 gr of CO2 to the environment. According to ZDnet, Bridge Ratings says the average phone call is in general 3 minutes 15 seconds, producing then 185 gr of CO2. One text is just 0.014 gr!  Adding all the “txts 2 ur frnds 4 a yr” produce 51 gr, so it’s better to send texts than call, remember!

Food: an hamburger produces 2.5Kg of CO2 while a veggie burger, an orange or a slice of bread just 1Kg. 1.8Kg for 6 eggs, 720gr for a Bottle of milk, 210Kg for a year of coffee and 12Kg for a whole case of cheese, 900gr for an imported beer (happy days..beer beats burger).

Uh, this is interesting. I am getting married in August, so let’s see how much a wedding produces: a wedding with 100 guests produces 5 tons of CO2, a big style with 300 guests, about 85 tons. Let’s reduce the guestlist then!! (It’s for the environment, you know…)

Sport: a football match produces 820 tons of CO2. The world championship has produced a total of 2.8 million tons. And the rest I’d say if you calculate all the “extras” around it.

Population: now, here I will get some bad feedback from my friends all over the world, but these are the numbers. Number one pollutants seem to be Australians, with 30 tons of CO2 per person yearly, followed by Americans (28), 15 for British and surprise surprise just 3.3 for a chinese (tons of CO2, lets remember) and at the end my friend africans with just 1 ton per person/year.

Just to remind everyone, a VW Beetle weights 1 ton, so make the comparisons…

Travelling: a flight NY to Miami emits 193kg per person. Every day on Europe skies are produced 560.000 tons of CO2. (Yes, 560.000 VW Beetles). If you count ALL the flights in one day all over the world, we are at 670 million tons of CO2. Still making the VW Beetle example uh? A night in a hotel produces just 25Kg. No smoking room, obviously.

So, what is Zero emission?

An apple just picked from a tree (at the supermarket it’s 80gr and imported from abroad 150gr). Zero emission is drying your clothes on the line outside or, a nice warm bath with solar energy heated water.

This post has produced about 20gr of CO2, Not bad indeed!

Here is the website: How Much CO2 is created by...

Original post taken from: here