Can Deleting Emails Lower Your Carbon Footprint?

Emails: the convenient way to message colleagues, get coupons from favorite stores, and send out newsletters- amongst other things. Even though emails have proved themselves as communication essentials in modern life, they have also earned a reputation for filling up computer storage, as people procrastinate on deleting them. While it’s common knowledge that emails can take up a lot of space, it’s not so obvious that receiving and sending mail can negatively affect your carbon footprint. 

On a global basis, nearly 246 billion emails are sent daily. Surprisingly, these emails are responsible for adding around 986,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every day. How can a harmless email translate into a carbon catastrophe with one simple click of ‘send’? 

To understand what is at stake here, we must first take a look at the companies through which the emails are being sent. Corporations such as Yahoo and Google use data centers and networks that hold all the search power and information that is on the internet. The processing of these emails increases operations within the data centers and causes the carbon output of these centers to skyrocket. 

On a global basis, nearly 246 billion emails are sent daily. Surprisingly, these emails are responsible for adding around 986,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every day.

A single email is considered equivalent to 0.0000001 tons of carbon. That is 0.00032 ounces of carbon or 9.0718474 milligrams of carbon. When emails go undeleted, it’s the data centers that must hold on to them. The process data centers use to keep emails is constantly at work making it a major carbon emitter. This may not seem like a big deal at first, but it adds up, especially on a global scale.  A study done by OVO Energy in the United Kingdom found that if every single person in the world sent one less email a day, carbon emissions would be lowered by nearly 16,433 tons per day. To put this number into perspective, the average vehicle passenger emits around 5.07 tons of carbon per year. This means that if everyone in the world would send one less email per day, the amount of carbon emissions in the atmosphere would be reduced to the same quantity of carbon released by a single person if they were to drive for 3,241.23 years. 

How can we limit the amount of carbon produced through emails? The easiest answer to this question is to send fewer emails. For example, emails with no attachments average about 4 grams of carbon, and emails with large attachments average around 50 grams of carbon. Unsubscribing to email lists and blocking spam emails are also effective at reducing Co2. 

Spam typically ranges from 0.3 to 4 grams of carbon and when deleted, data centers can get rid of the data attached to the email which reduces the amount of carbon used to store email data. 

Lowering the carbon footprint produced by emails is a shared responsibility between companies and their customers. Large companies like Apple, have begun increasing the amount of renewable energy used to power their data centers. Likewise, Google has pledged to convert 100% of the power used for its data centers to renewable energy by (2030). 

Moreover, larger companies can also adopt sustainable search engines. For instance, Ecosia is a search engine that pledges to plant a tree for every search done through its data centers, meaning that users of its platform can offset carbon emissions that are caused by email communication simply by switching to a different internet browser. 

Who would have thought that you can start making your mark on Co2 emissions from your computer? This individual effort to combat a lesser-known environmental challenge declutters laptops from advertisements and saves time that is wasted on managing promo emails. At the same time, email users are consciously preventing carbon from entering the atmosphere with every click of unsubscribe. 

Beyond removing subscription and spam mail, improving communication skills will result in clearer and more concise messages that lack unnecessary information and avoid the back-and-forth threads that take days or even months to resolve. An effective email increases productivity while decreasing your carbon footprint. With these small adaptations, there is restored hope that the emails your open will find you well.