What would be one of the easiest ways to reduce your carbon footprint?

How about deleting your junk, spam, and unwanted emails?

Surprisingly, if you delete your junk emails in your mailbox, you can reduce carbon emissions and save our planet to some extent. 

The invention of Electronic mail or E-mail has single-handedly revolutionized the way people communicate. Its features like multiple recipients, sending attachments and low or no maintenance cost have helped it gain many users very quickly.

The first-ever email was sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971. Today, we already have around 4 billion email accounts worldwide. And this number is going to increase rapidly in the coming years.

Even though email has been invented as a professional communication tool, we are currently using it for casual communication as well. It is estimated that around 306 billion emails are sent daily.

So how are all these emails causing damage to the planet? Let’s see.

All emails which are in your mailbox are saved over multiple servers. So, the more emails we have, the more servers are needed to save them. These servers and data centers used to store our emails use ridiculous amounts of electricity and need thousands of liters of water for cooling in addition to air conditioning. And that electricity is still produced by the burning of fossil fuels which produce greenhouse gases harmful to the environment.

So, the simple equation is 

More emails = More servers = More pollution.

According to carbon footprint expert and researcher Mike Berners Lee, every unopened spam email stored in the server results in an emission of about 0.3 grams of CO2 into the atmosphere. For a normal opened email, the emission ranges from 4 to 5 grams, and for an email with a lot of text and attachments like PDF or other documents and images, the emissions can be as high as 50 grams of CO2.

As previously mentioned, 4 billion email accounts are receiving around 306 billion emails daily. In other words, daily, an average email account receives 77 emails. 

Let us just assume all the email accounts receiving one less email a day. That means, 4 billion fewer emails are sent and that stops 12000 tonnes of CO2 from entering into atmosphere considering they are spam emails. And additionally, we can also save a lot of electricity which can be used for other important things.

There are researches which state that around 50% of our emails are spam emails. So, half of the emails saved in servers are not useful to us and additionally are using up a lot of electricity and releasing harmful carbon dioxide into the environment.

So what should we do now?

It’s simple. Start deleting your spam and other useless emails. Nowadays, we receive an email for everything. It might be regarding the order you have placed on an e-commerce site, or notification for which you have subscribed for or newsletters and other offers. 

Social media emails fill our inboxes. Most of the time, we don’t even open our emails. Some people have multiple email addresses and do not check their mailbox for months. I am sure that at least 60% of your emails in mailboxes are useless and are deletable.

Moreover, if something as simple as deleting our useless emails will save the planet, then we should definitely do it. We owe to the planet at least that much.

Few steps that will help you declutter your mailbox.

• Regularly scan your mailbox for old and unnecessary emails and delete them.
• Do not subscribe to unnecessary notification services that will send you emails.
• If there are newsletters and offers which you do not want to see, try blocking or restricting those senders.
• Use apps that can remove your useless emails in bulk.
• Regularly monitor your social media messages and try to delete them. Many mailboxes readily categorize them.

Try to choose green email providers. Green email providers are those who provide their email service without causing any damage to nature. All of their data centers use green electricity.  

“It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen” – John Wooden.

I’m sure you might be lazy to plant a tree, or water it regularly, but deleting your unwanted emails, I am sure you can do that and be a hero.

Written by

RAJASIMHA.B

Instagram- rajasimha0