How Sweatcoin Is Helping The Environment

Tom - Contributing Writer

Posted on Wednesday 16th September 2020
Sweatcoin

 

You may not have heard of them, but over the past few years there’s been an influx of apps trying to cash in on stuff we do every day. Specifically, I’m talking about walking. Apps like Sweatcoin, Winwalk and Yodo promise to pay their users for walking as much as they can. So just how much are they helping the environment?

After exploring these apps (admittedly more for the incentive of being paid), I started to notice they all had one nasty side effect; my battery was dropping like there was no tomorrow. Despite running in the background, they had to be constantly tracking my location and steps, which made my phone hot,and more importantly, flat.

These apps work by rewarding you for every 1,000 steps you do with their own coin system, which can later be redeemed for products and gift cards from companies who have paid the app to promote them. It’s a win for consumer, app and advertiser, but what about the environment? I decided to run an experiment to get to the bottom of just how green they are.

 

The Experiment

I focused on Sweatcoin and disabled the rest for a natural test and after running my battery from full down to almost flat, I could see that Sweatcoin had used a whopping 22% of my battery without me even opening it. For my phone, that’s about 600mAh (milli-Amp hours), which roughly equates to 4.2Wh (Watt hours) under normal usage.

Now if we only focus on electricity usage alone and don’t take into account at all the fact that these apps are making people walk instead of drive, it’s a pretty remarkable result.

Despite that 22% going missing, our 4.2Wh is surprisingly low. As much as people like to complain about their phone batteries, their actually extremely efficient little things. To put 4.2Wh into perspective, I went and found the most energy efficient light bulb at my supermarket. The result was a 5.5W LED bulb (5.5Wh per hour of usage).

 

What Does It All Mean

Basically, having Sweatcoin run on your phone all day consumes less electricity than having a single light bulb on in your house for an hour. That’s using the most conservative possible numbers to try and level the playing field, but in reality, there are so many variables that would make the gap far larger. For example, if you used a 5.5W lightbulb, it wouldn’t be bright enough to light a room on it’s own and who actually sits in a room without technology anymore?

But that would all mean nothing if people weren’t actually walking any more than before they signed up. Well, according to a study by the British Journal of Sports, users walked 20% more than before they used the app. So you can see how it’s making a difference, albeit small.

Broadening our view, we can also see how these apps incentivize walking over driving. With transport pollution being the fourth biggest emissions contributor worldwide, leaving the car at home has never been more important.

Another interesting, but not immediately apparent knock on effect, is how it gets people fit. Obviously walking more will help you lose weight, which in turn will lower your daily energy consumption. Eating less equals emitting less.

A heightened awareness of health is also likely to result in a decrease in fast food consumption, which uses far more energy getting the product to you than almost all other food sectors, for the sake of profit.

 

Walking Apps Are Doing Their Bit

Whether it was intentional or not is up to debate, but in the creation of this apps, an environmental masterpiece has been created. All the reasons stated will admittedly have a fairly small effect on your daily emissions, but considering more than 30 million people are actively using these apps around the world, it really starts to add up.

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