Understanding and reducing your email carbon footprint.
Emails, emails, emails!
Many of us will have received hundreds of emails per day and we send a lot of them too according to Market.us 319.6 Billion e-mails were being sent daily worldwide in 2021 and this number is only expected to rise! To a massive 376.4 billion e-mails per day by 2025. Email Users Statistics, Facts, Users, Clients, Age Group, Ethnicity (market.us) But what impact do emails have on our environment?
Well.. it is not exactly the email itself that is the issue. The issue lies with the servers used to check the domain details of the recipient’s email address, however, for emails to work correctly, we need to have this server in place!Â
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So how much CO2e does a single email use and how can we reduce our carbon footprint?
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The average carbon footprint of a single email is 0.3g CO2e.Â
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These numbers will however be slightly different for everyone as calculating emissions generated by email is not as simple as it may seem. It depends on the type of device you are sending from/used to create the email, how long it takes the sender to write the email, how long it takes to read the email, and whether the email includes attachments (if it does then you could use up too 50g of co2e). All of these factors will have an impact and Over a year we use around 3-40kgs of CO2e, which is the equivalent of driving 10-128 miles in a small car!
In the grand scheme of things, the impact of emails is not the biggest carbon footprint issue but it is an easy one to tackle so here is a little list of all of the ways you can reduce your carbon emissions when sending emails:
- Only subscribe to the email services you need.
- Make sure to unsubscribe from mailing lists that you no longer read.
- Deleting old emails you do not need anymore.
- Sending less one-word emails.
- Copying fewer people into emails. (instead, send one update out at the end of your email thread to the relevant people.) This means fewer emails clogging up your inbox too.
- Sending an attachment instead of the full document.
- Keep emails brief and concise. (not too brief though no one word answers!)
Implementing these quick tactics can be a great way to reduce your carbon footprint and stay sustainable!