Save our Planet by Deleting emails

Save our Planet by Deleting emails

  Deleting emails can save our planet? 

Did you know that spam emails, unread emails, and unwanted emails all contribute to carbon emissions? The average American has around 500 unread emails If we deleted 500 unread emails (assuming they’re not important emails), that would delete 175 grams of carbon dioxide if each email contributes 0.3 grams of CO2. As we all know, electricity is generated through fossil fuels. Emails, texts, messages are transmitted through the Internet and it gets stored in data centers. As of 2019, 293.6 billion emails are sent per day which is roughly 107 billion spam emails in one day or 24 hours. 

                                         Let’s put that all in numbers 

  • Spam energy uses = 33 billion kilowatt-hours =
  • Used electricity in 2.4 million homes = 
  • Greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars =
  • 2 billion U.S. gallons of gasoline 

I have good news for you! 

If everyone around the world deleted 10 emails (spam or not spam), that has the power of deleting 1,725,00 GB because storing 1GB of emails or 1,000 emails takes 32 kWh, generating 55.2 million kWh. 

As of 2019, there are 3.9 billion email users, so if you could delete 10 emails that would cut 39,035 metric tonnes of CO2e which =19356 tonnes of coal that is burned every day. 

#delete10emails 

Let’s dig a little deeper. 

  • Average spam email=0.3g CO2e
  • Standard email=4 g CO2e
  • Email with attachments such as pdf, links =50g CO2e

Remember, about 300 billion emails are sent a day which means as of 2019 45% of a person’s email is spam. That translates to 14.5 billion messages around the world in just one day. 

According to the International Energy Agency, China emits 9.3GT CO2, the United States following up with 4.8GT, and India with 2.2GT. Russia Federation, Japan, Germany, and South Korea are below 2.0 GT. You can check out the data here

Solution:

Unsubscribe from emails you don’t need, delete spam emails, don’t sign up for newsletters you aren’t going to read, and delete emails after reading them. 

Source: https://medium.com/@parthgarg19/what-if-deleting-emails-could-save-our-planet-8667584367ee 

https://en.reset.org/blog/save-planet-clean-your-inbox-12242015

Credit: courtesy of Parth Garg from the Medium 

Picture: Intelligent Living Andrea E. Stuffen 

Asheley Wi

This Post Has 2 Comments

Leave a Reply