Email: A Major Culprit of Digital Pollution
In the article about Digital Pollution, I talked about how digital pollution is slowly becoming a major source of pollution. Estimates placed the quantity of energy consumed to power digital devices and networks around 1.5 to 2 percent worldwide between 2008 and 2011. The quantity is roughly similar to the aviation industry and is expected to grow to 3 percent of total world energy use by 2020.
In this article, I will focus on how email, which was once hailed as a paperless tool beneficial for the planet, has now become a cause of concern in regards to carbon emissions.
An email transfer requires a lot of energy: your message passes through an Internet Service Provider, reaches its data centre and is then redirected to the recipient’s data centre.
A few figures:
1. An email stored in an email account for one year emits 19g (0.67oz) of CO2.
2. And sending an email and copying 10 people multiplies CO2 emissions by four.
3. Sending 33 emails of 1 MB to two recipients every day produces 180kg of CO2 a year — the same as driving 621.3 miles by car.
4. Each year, 293,000 million emails are sent globally, of which 80% are never opened
5. 10 billion emails are sent every hour. The equivalent of 4,000 tons of oil or the production of 15 nuclear power plants in one hour.
6. 126,813,600,000 is the number of bottles of one litre of CO2 emitted per hour because of emails.
Crazy, right? Think of all those unopened emails sitting in your inbox right now. Seemed pretty harmless. But who knew that they’re emitting carbon emissions at such a rate?
So, how do you manage your emails more efficiently, and try to achieve digital sobriety?
“Digital Sobriety” is defined by The Shift Project as the following: “buy the least powerful equipment possible, change them as rarely as possible, and reduce unnecessary energy-intensive uses”.
1. Whenever possible, avoid sending useless messages. If you need to say something to a co-worker, for example, get up from your desk and go talk to them.
2. Use an internal messaging tool, such as Slack. It consumes less energy than emails.
3. Do not copy lots of recipients on an email if it is unnecessary.
4. Clean your inbox and unsubscribe from polluting newsletters that you don’t read.
5. Send lighter emails — for big data, you can use USB drivers or external hard drives, or even a web hosting tool, like WeTransfer.
6. Compress the files you send by email.
7. Use an anti-spam tool and regularly empty your recycle bin and spam folder.
8. Delete those emails that are just sitting idle in your inbox from 10 years ago
9. Or instead of doing all of this, let an app do it for you. InstaClean is an email cleaner app which removes unwanted/unread emails and also blocks email from unwanted subscriptions. Not just that, you also help plant trees! Every 1,000 coins you earn, can be used to plant a sapling in Tamil Nadu, India.
