What is carbon footprint of your gadget?

LONDON - Google has recently invested $5 billion on an offshore wind farm project in a bid to reduce the company’s carbon emissions.

The MacBook 2010 produces nine grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) per hour while the product is idle. The average 60 watt lightbulb produces 48.4 grams of CO2 per hour.

Apple, which has a company footprint of 9.6 million tonnes, claims to have reduced the MacBook’s carbon emissions by 12 percent over the last four years despite investing the machines with greater power.

Some reports have suggested that seven grams of CO2 is produced per Google search, making two searches roughly the equivalent of boiling a kettle (15g of CO2), reports the Telegraph.

However, there was a lot of controversy around these figures, which, in fact, derive from the power of the computers used to perform the searches.

Google claim that actually a simple one-hit search produces only 0.2 gram of CO2. It was estimated in 2009 that more than 200 million Google searches are performed every day.

A 34-37 inch plasma-screen TV used for 6.5 hours daily will use 264 watts of power - the equivalent of 269 kg CO2 per year. A normal LCD TV produces 215 kg of carbon a year.

Every minute spent on a mobile phone is estimated to produce 57 grams CO2. And for those who talk an hour a day, a year’s usage is equivalent to the same amount of emissions as flying from London to New York one way (125 million tonnes CO2).

Using a landline phone uses one-third of the power it takes to make a call on a mobile phone.