How emails are destroying our planet

We have all been there. The email inbox is exploding, well I can only speak for myself and say that my inbox is for sure exploding. But just a full inbox doesn’t mean that these emails are super necessary. Actually, it is the opposite, most of them are crap.

When I look through my inbox I find random emails from newsletters I signed up to get a coupon code once, newsletters I thought I would read but never even open up, thank you emails from colleagues, or simply spam. The list goes on. According to Statista, this adds up to around 300 billion emails sent every single day in 2020.

The big problem: every email you sent contributes to global warming. Mike Berners-Lee, professor in the environment center at Lancaster University and author of the book How Bad are Bananas: The carbon footprint of everything, explains:

“When you press send it goes through the network, and it takes electricity to run the network. And it’s going to end up being stored on the cloud somewhere, and those data centres use a lot of electricity. We don’t think about it because we can’t see the smoke coming out of our computers, but the carbon footprint of IT is huge and growing.”

Mike Berners-Lee also researched that on average an email emits 4 grams of carbon emissions, multiply that with 300 billion e-mails a day…. yeah that is a lot of CO2.

According to Statista, around 50% of all the emails sent are spam. Simply receiving spam creates 0.3 gram of CO2. That would mean that every year, 55 trillion spam emails are sent, resulting in 16 billion kg of CO2. 16 billion kg of CO2 just for spam emails that are never even opened up. That is insane.

But what can we do as individuals? A study by Censuswide research states, that every Adult in Britain sends 11.26 unnecessary emails a week. OVO energy company further researches, that if every Britain adult, sends one less unnecessary email a day, this would be equal to taking 3,3343 diesel cars off the road (16,433 tonnes of carbon a year)

So please, think before you send your next email. Is it really necessary? And also don’t only think about the carbon footprint but also keep in mind that you are interrupting a colleague. We need to slow down and focus.

Key actions:

  • Think before you send. Is it valuable or just crap?
  • Unsubscribe from all newsletters you don’t read
  • Reduce the size of emails by compressing the attachments

Sources:

Laura Knörle
2021 Laura Knörle - hey@lauraknoerle.com