• Environmental impact of Instagram features in France 2020

With the rising trend of Internet sustainability and ecology, the source has provided insights about the energy consumption levels of the different Instagram features on a mobile phone device. Thus, in 2020, publishing a story or a photo consumed less than five milliampere hour (mAh), compared to viewing or hosting a Live, which had an energy consumption about four and a half times higher. Transforming this energy consumption into carbon (CO2) emissions, publishing a photo or scrolling through a feed on Instagram were the most impactful on the environment with a value of around 1.55 grams of CO2 equivalent.

Ranking of Instagram features according to their energy consumption in France in 2020 (in milliampere hour)

Characteristic	mAh (milliampere hour)
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Release date

July 2020

More information

Region

France

Survey time period

2020

Supplementary notes

The source adds the following information :
"The Instagram mobile application (version 148.0.033.121) was measured on an S7 smartphone (Android 8), and the user scenarios (publish a story, publish a picture, scrolling the news feed, hosting a live, and viewing a live video) were carried out through the GREENSPECTOR Test Runner, allowing the performance of automated tests. Each measurement is the average of 3 homogeneous measurements (with a low standard deviation).
To assess the impacts of infrastructure (datacenter, network) in the carbon projection calculations, the source relied on the OneByte methodology based on real data measured on the volume of data exchanged. This assessment methodology takes into account the consumption of resources and energy in use for the requested equipment. As this is a very macroscopic approach, it is subject to uncertainty and could be refined to adapt to a given context, to a given tool. For the Carbon projection, the source assumed a 50 percent projection via a wifi network and 50 percent via a mobile network. To assess the impacts of the mobile in the carbon projection calculations, the source has measured the energy consumption of the user scenario on a real device and in order to integrate the material impact share, the source relied on the theoretical wear rate generated by the user scenario on the battery, the first wearing part of a smartphone. 500 full charge and discharge cycles therefore cause a change of smartphone in the model."

The source specifies the testing times for each feature:
- publish a story: 22 seconds
- publish a picture: 59 seconds
- scrolling the news feed: 63 seconds
- hosting a live: 119 seconds
- viewing a live video: 119 seconds

The exact date of the study was not specified.

Figures were rounded.