Are Our Binge Habits Destroying The Environment?

When it comes to the environment, Netflix and Amazon have no chill. And we can thank Greenpeace for calling them out. The NGO recently released its 2015 Click Clean report, which breaks down just how much energy is zapped up while we binge on our favourite devices. According to Mashable's breakdown, streaming will eventually account for nearly 80% of all internet traffic by 2020. Take a second and let that number sink in for a sec. "The lion's share of the amount of data that's transmitted across the internet is involved with video streaming," said Arman Shehabi. Shehabi, who spoke directly to Mashable, is a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. While sitting for several hours watching back-to-back episodes of Narcos or Transparent seems harmless, we're actually leaving a massive carbon footprint. For the last few years, we've streamed billions of hours of movies over just as many servers. Basically, we've been burning through energy like never before. The biggest takeaway from the Click Clean Report, however, was that the bigwig streaming companies — Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon — have yet to fully invest in renewable and clean energy practices in their data centres. Read more about the report here. And the next time you wake up on the sofa with that creepy Are you still watching? prompt on your TV, maybe do the earth a favour and just turn it off? Baby steps.