Nov 28

Nov 28 Lesson Fifty-Nine: Email Carbon

Did you know there are roughly 3 million emails sent every second?! Aaaaand did you know that each one has their own carbon footprint!? 📬✉️

Continuing on the thread of digital pollution from last week, this week we’re going to look at the carbon footprint of emailing.

While one email itself is relatively harmless, their impact can add up really quickly - especially when they sit in an inbox forever and ever (👀 I’m looking at all the people who have 9,284 unread emails in their gmail).

We’re going to break down this lesson by covering:
1️⃣ What is digital pollution?
2️⃣ What are the impacts of emailing?
3️⃣ What (super easy) things can you do to reduce your email’s carbon footprint?

WHAT IS DIGITAL POLLUTION?

We may think of our digital platforms as being “in the cloud” with zero tangible impacts – but that is far from the truth.

The internet is rooted in physical infrastructure. It cannot exist without a massive network of cables, data centres and servers - which require aggressive amounts of power. This is the basis of digital pollution.

EMAIL IMPACTS

When you press ‘send’ on an email, it goes through the network.

The email will then end up being stored on the cloud somewhere in a data centre and because they run hot, immense amount of cooling is needed.

You probably don’t think about it because you can’t see it, but all of these steps require a huge amount of electricity!

According to a study, the carbon footprints of emails are approximately:

It is estimated that there are over 4 billion email users in the world with 3 million emails being sent per second.

That brings us to 319.6 billion emails being sent daily.

A study in the UK found that if people sent one fewer “thank you” email per day, it would save the equivalent of taking 3,334 cars off the road. That’s just from one less email.