Carbon Footprint of Emails.

How getting better connected to your emails can help to reduce your carbon footprint.

In March, a few local school’s took part in British Science Week – a ten-day celebration of all things science, technology, engineering and math’s (STEM). The theme for 2023 was “connections”. Around the same time, I was sent an article about how much energy is needed to send, receive, and store emails, and the carbon dioxide emitted as a result. The environmental impact of my emails whizzing through the air had never really occurred to me. Which got me thinking – how connected do we really feel to our emails, how they’re processed, and the impact this has on the environment? If you’re anything like me, the answer is not very! After all, the ‘free’ email services provided by the likes of Google and Yahoo, and everything that goes on behind the scenes, is a fairly intangible concept for most people. Fortunately, it’s not hard to get more connected to your emailing habits and have a positive environmental impact in the process. Here’s how… Let’s start with those connections…

Sending and storing emails uses energy. Electricity powers the devices we use to write, send and receive them, as well as the data centres where they’re stored and processed (sent on to their recipients). And whether that electricity comes from a power plant burning fossil fuels or biomass, or from geothermal or solar sources, its production creates carbon dioxide.

The good news is that, although we’re a few steps removed from the actual carbon dioxide being produced, we can still make a difference to how much is produced by getting more connected to our emailing habits and making changes for the good of the planet.

Calculating your email carbon footprint:

Emails generate anything from 0.3 grammes (g) of carbon dioxide equivalent¹ (CO2e) for that annoying spam filling up your junk mailbox, to 50g of CO2e for larger emails with attachments. The average is 4g CO2e per email.²

So, for example 100 emails a day at 4g CO2e per email x 365 days per year is 146kg CO2e per year.
Now imagine there are 1,359 emails just sitting in your inbox, some of them from 2012, weighing in at 4g CO2e per email… that’s another 5kg CO2e. (This article’s author promises to have cleaned up their act by the time this is published!). All in, one person’s emails could be worth 150kg CO2e per year, and probably more.

While one person’s ‘email footprint’ may feel quite small on its own, when you think about the combined weight of all the emails sent, received, and stored in any one day is estimated to be more than 300 billion, that footprint soon adds up.

The great email de-clutter:
By de-cluttering your inbox you can do your small part to reduce the carbon emissions from
your online activities. Here are a few simple things to do on a regular basis to achieve that:
- Delete old emails.
- Unsubscribe from irrelevant mailing lists.

 Block the spam!
Think before you send – a simple ‘thank you’ email costs 4g CO2e.
Include links instead of attachments where possible to keep emails ‘lighter.’
Hopefully, this has helped you get better connected to you emails, and on your way to lightening your future emailing load.

Written by- Clare Feast- Volunteer at CPRE Bucks