There is a lot of discussion about the impact of digital on the environment. A lot of uncertainties especially because it is complicated to calculate the carbon impact of an email.
Do emails emit a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?
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Scientific studies are sometimes very divergent, but nowadays the figures are of the same order of magnitude.
An average spam email: 0.3 g CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent)
A standard email: 4 g CO2e
An email with "long and tiresome attachments": 50 g CO2e
(source: Carbon Literacy)
This is no small thing, but it is also not the main source of carbon emissions in our lives. Other drastic reductions are possible by acting on our consumption of meat, our use of the private car, our consumption habits.
How beneficial is it to delete things from email and other locations?
@Julie McLennan Deleting emails and attachments in your mailbox is a good idea yes!
There are about 2.3 billion email users in the world. The average email size is about 75 kb. So, if everyone deletes around 10 unwanted emails (spam and non-spam), it could prevent 1,725,000 GB of data being stored in the servers around the world.
The energy used to store 1 GB of data is around 32 kWh. So calculating that it would mean generating 55.2 million kWh less electricity to power those servers.
And that’s cutting about 39,035 metric tonnes of CO2e which is equivalent to 19 356 tonnes of coal burnt every day to generate that amount of electricity (assuming that fossil fuels are being used). That’s a crazy amount of C02e released in the atmosphere every day that could be saved.
@laq 💯
Cool, thanks for sharing!