An average person creates 22 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the data they generate through photos and videos, texts and emails each year – equivalent to flying from London to New York 26 times, according to scientists.
Across the UK population, photos taken on smartphones alone create 805,083 tonnes of C02 a year, which has a similar carbon footprint to flying from London to New York 934,109 times, researchers said.
This data is collected by companies and stored at various data centres around the globe in the form of bytes – which uses strings of ones and zeros to process and store information.
