Environmental cost of emails

Royalty-free image of emails from Pixabay

When people send out mass emails, how often do they stop to think about the environmental cost of their action? My mailboxes are choked by newsletters from businesses and emails from people who CC anybody and everybody.

Professor Mike Berners-Lee has contributed to two projects investigating the carbon footprint of emails - a book titled 'How Bad are Bananas: The Carbon Footprint of Everything' and a study commissioned by Ovo Energy.

A spam email: 0.3g CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent)

A proper email: 0.4g CO2e

An email with a large attachment: 50g CO2e

He also found that many unnecessary short emails with messages including 'Thank you' and 'Received' contributed to 23,475,000 kg of carbon in UK per year.

Where is the carbon coming from? Electricity is needed to type, send and read emails. If inboxes are not cleared regularly, these emails are stored in data centres which require huge amounts of energy for running, connection with the Internet and cooling. Multiple backup servers are also needed.

With this information, I feel that it is responsible for Internet users to declutter their digital workspace periodically. I have nine email accounts based on my memory. Ridiculous, I know, and it is time to purge them.

I start off by going through recent emails and identifying spam sources. I make sure to unsubscribe first before filtering and deleting all of the emails from these senders.

I have deleted only 2000 emails in an hour and I am only at the tip of the iceberg. If everyone takes some time to clear their inboxes, it will reduce a substantial amount of energy consumption.

Sources:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/prof-mike-berners-lee-warns-against-environmental-impact-of-pointless-emails

https://cleanfox.io/blog/digital-pollution-en/digital-pollution-emails-and-carbon-emissions/

https://nypost.com/2019/11/26/your-emails-are-ruining-the-environment-study/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/01/25/how-bad-is-email-for-the-environment/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/2010/oct/21/carbon-footprint-email