CarbonFeed

CarbonFeed takes your most recent 200 tweets and turns them into a minute loop, a song that changes over your Twitter lifetime. Every time you tweet you generate 0.02g/C02, which means 2 tweets are equivalent to 1 human breath*. If you tweet regularly, then your song equates to approximately a small chorus (ten-fifteen people) breathing in that one-minute time span. Now that’s a lot of hot air.

Don’t worry too much though. Listening to your one-minute song will eat up roughly 2.86 grams/C02e in electricity, servers, and embodied computer emissions [6].

*The breakdown of 1 human breath ~ 2 tweets.

Normal C02 levels (Capnography) in a human are 35-45mmHG or 4.0-5.6% with each breath [1]. The Tidal Volume (volume inhaled and exhaled during normal breathing) of an adult is 6-7mL/kg, [2] or roughly 400-500mL [3]. We can then determine that the range of C02 per breath is between 16mL and 28mL. Using the molecular weight of C02 [4], we can determine that the weight of C02 in one human breath has the range of 0.02947 grams to 0.0515794 grams. With 1 tweet ~ 0.02g/C02e [5], then one breath is equivalent to between 1.5-2.5 tweets, or on average, 2 tweets.

[1] CareFusion. Capnography Handbook. 2010. Last accessed Aug. 11, 2014.
[2] Family Practice Notebook. Last accessed Aug. 11, 2014.
[3] Nina Singh-Radcliff. 5-Minute Anesthesia Consult. p. 740. Last accessed Aug. 11, 2014.
[4] Wolframs Alpha. Last accessed Aug. 11, 2014.
[5] Dave Bellona. Weighing the Cloud. p.102. Last accessed Aug. 11, 2014.
[6] Mike Berners-Lee. How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything. Greystone Books. 2011.