YouTube could help the planet by throwing out its digital waste

If people who are only listening to videos don’t have images playing, companies like YouTube might make themselves more Earth-friendly, a new study finds. That’s because a lot of the energy used to get that video to your eyeballs happens at the network and device level.
By sending only sound to users who aren’t watching, the company could reduce its annual carbon footprint by the equivalent of about 300,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. That’s about the same amount of the greenhouse gas produced by 30,000 homes in the UK every year, according to a University of Bristol press release.
People watch a billion hours of YouTube every day, and each of those views sucks up energy. There’s your phone or computer, the internet or cell…

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