Emails — Articles — Centric Magazine

By Christine Wallace

Before writing this article, I used to be the kind of person who never deleted emails. I had an inbox of unopened emails in the hundreds if not thousands, knowing that most of them where subscriptions or newsletters I would never get around to reading. With roughly 294 billion emails having been sent and received every day in 2019, a figure set to only rise on a yearly basis, I don’t think I am alone in this. This raises the question of what, if any, impact do all these emails have on the environment? The answer is that, after taking in to account the energy used to send the email and the infrastructure needed in order to send it, every email sent creates around 4g of CO2 emission. As a result, 294 billion emails soon add up to just short of 1.2 million kilograms of CO2 emissions, an incredibly significant number when talking about climate change. A recent BBC article found that if everyone living in the UK sent one less email a day, it would equal tens of thousands of flights to Europe. Although this impact is still a scratch on the 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases we add yearly to the atmosphere, it is a step in the right direction on the UK’s legal obligation to reach Net Zero by 2050. Managing your emails is just one step you can take to lowering your individual electricity demand and one which we can all do quickly and at no extra cost.

There is another environmental benefit in unsubscribing to fashion-based subscriptions in particular. The impact of producing and making clothes is monumental to green house emissions. A single pair of jeans adds an equivalent of 33.4kg of carbon. In fact, the fashion industry contributes more to climate change per year than all international flights and maritime travel combined. Every year it uses 93 billion cubic meters of water, enough for five million people. It is not just the resources that go in to making clothes that is the issue, but also the sheer amount of consumption and waste that follows it. Every week 13 million items of clothing end up in UK landfills. By unsubscribing to fashion marketing, you are less likely to impulse buy and over buy, helping save both your money and the environment.

Unsubscribing, or even just clearing out your inbox, can also help the environment by reducing the server space used up by stored emails. The average number of emails in a person’s inbox today is 200, with each email size averaging 75kb, all of these stored emails are kept in data centres which require a large amount of energy to function. Roughly 2% of the world’s electricity is consumed by data centres and with data gathering continuing to grow this is expected to reach 8% by 2030. To put this into perspective, this is a greater energy consumption than some of the lesser developed countries. What makes this statistic more shocking is that only 6% of the data in those centres, including all those stored emails you have, is in active use. The result of this is simple, more fossil fuels are being burned to create the energy to keep your ‘data landfill’ functioning. Luckily, unlike the landfills those 13 million pieces of clothing go to each week in the UK, we as individuals can reverse our impact immediately simply by pressing the delete button.

In its efforts to tackle climate change the world is making progress on relying on renewable energy sources to power our day-to-day activities, which may leave some thinking that as individuals we do not need to lower our energy consumption. However, as the world population grows, our way of living demands more energy and as lesser developed countries move closer to the living standards of developed countries, we need to lower our personal consumption and develop more energy efficient technology so that our consumption of electricity does not out scale our ability to produce it cleanly.