We all love spending time online, but we rarely stop to think about the toll it takes on the environment. This goes beyond measuring your personal power usage—unless you're mining Bitcoin—because the servers needed to run some of the web's most popular websites are the real culprits. A recent study has identified the worst offenders.
WebsiteToolTester compiled data from the homepages of the 140 most popular websites in the world and found that YouTube produces the most CO2 emissions annually—that's a whopping 702 billion grams of carbon. This is followed by Google.com, which accounts for 257 billion grams, mainly because it's the most visited website in the world.
Zoom ranks third on the list of yearly carbon emissions, with over 114 billion grams, while Reddit accounts for 103 billion grams, and Amazon produces 93 billion grams. Social media websites Twitter and Facebook create 58 billion and 48 billion grams of carbon each year, respectively. Other websites of note among the 50 worst include Yahoo.com, Microsoft.com, Xvideos.com, Netflix.com, Pornhub.com, Ebay.com, Slack.com, Hulu.com, Disneyplus.com, Onlyfans.com, Apple.com, and Linkedin.com.
Meanwhile, The Daily Mail website produces the most CO2 emissions per visit, with a whopping 30.39 grams of carbon each time someone loads up the homepage. This is likely due to a combination of long server-load times, site layout, and total visits. Other websites that have a significant cost on the environment with every visit are Reddit, Slack, Zoom, and Samsung.
Recommended by Our Editors
An interesting find is that many popular shopping websites are among the worst when it comes to carbon emissions. This means Bath & Body Works, Wayfair, Amazon, Uniqlo, Ulta Beauty, Sephora, and Shein, make up nearly half of the 20 worst websites.
It's not all bad news; Instagram, for instance, creates only 0.01g of CO2 per visit, thanks to its clean design. By comparison, Facebook creates 0.20g of carbon per visit, but it's hit hard by the sheer amount of traffic it receives each year. Twitter, on the other hand, creates 0.84 grams of carbon for each visit, making it the worst social-media site for the environment.
While Google.com is one of the worst offenders each year, it actually creates only 0.25g of CO2 per visit and is merely done in by the significant traffic it sees every year. If you're looking for a more environmentally friendly alternative, though, DuckDuckGo creates just 0.22g of carbon per visit and did not rank among the top 50 in CO2 emissions.