‘Don’t print this email – save the environment!’ Surely, you must have seen such communication at the bottom of corporate emails. That’s an obvious mandate. Printing costs money, it wastes paper and it’s bad for the environment, it impacts the carbon footprint. Every first grader can tell you that.

On the flip side, not so many people are aware of the environmental impact of just sending an email. You might think: ‘It’s virtual, online, it doesn’t have any impact’, but that wouldn’t exactly be true.

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According to the research done in November 2019 by OVO Energy just in the United Kingdom, it is possible to ‘reduce the carbon output by over 16,433 tonnes, just by each adult sending one less ‘thank you’ email a day.’

The same research states that 72% of the UK population is not aware of the fact that their inbox generates a carbon footprint.

British nation, so well known for their pleasantries, tend to overuse those not only in spoken language but also over email. Hence, you get plenty of ‘thank you’, ‘thanks’ ‘have a good weekend’ ‘cheers’ or ‘received’ once sentence emails, which apart from general niceness add very little to the actual conversation.

Do you really need to send this email? The carbon footprint of the digital age.

British nation, so well known for their pleasantries, tend to overuse those not only in spoken language but also over email. Hence, you get plenty of ‘thank you’, ‘thanks’ ‘have a good weekend’ ‘cheers’ or ‘received’ once sentence emails, which apart from general niceness add very little to the actual conversation.

Now, if each UK adult would send just one less of those unnecessary emails, the carbon footprint would be reduced by 16,433 tonnes a year (according to OVO Energy). ‘That’s ‘the equivalent of 81,152 flights to Madrid or taking 3,334 diesel cars off the road.’ Not too shabby!

Many people would be prepared to refrain from the general politeness of additional pointless emails if they knew that their actions might benefit the environment. Moreover, receivers wouldn’t mind if they stopped receiving such emails altogether.

What’s the carbon footprint of an email and how is it generated?

Let’s start by typing an email. You use a computer, laptop or mobile phone. Either way, such electronic devices use electricity. Then, your email travels through the network and it gets stored somewhere up in the cloud forever. The cloud’s not some magical place somewhere far far away. It is a virtual space powered by huge physical data centers hosting every digital information there is. Imagine how much electricity is needed to maintain the 24/7 operation of those data centers.

Just to put it into perspective, see how much CO2e is generated by an email (data from www.carbonliteracy.com):

  • 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
Do you really need to send this email? The carbon footprint of the digital age. 1

Sending one email per day probably wouldn’t make much of a difference to the environment, but if you send 50 emails per day and for your colleagues to do the same, the numbers will eventually stack up. According to www.sciencefocus.com ‘sending 65 emails is roughly equivalent to driving 1km in a car’. Now honestly – check how many emails you send during the month and see your contribution to global carbon emissions.

How to limit your digital carbon emissions?

The key to all this lies in awareness. Once you know and understand that even one short email leaves a mark on the environment, you might become more conscious of your actions. There are a few tricks you might use, to help you with this:

  1. Stop sending those short, pointless emails! – I assure you, your colleagues won’t think of you any less. Nobody needs the ‘have a nice weekend’ or ‘thank you’ emails. Trust me, everyone is busy even without that, so save your colleagues some time and save the environment at the same time.
  2. Install the ‘Carbon Capper’ OVO Energy has created a great tool, that can help you with building this habit. The Chrome Extension – ‘Carbon Capper’ will notify you when you write potentially pointless emails (especially those of under 4 words). It’s worth checking out.
  3. Do you really need to CC everybody? – not only are you adding work to people on your cc list (they have to read your email), but also you multiplying the energy spend. Watch your carbon footprint shrink as you limit your CC.
  4. Compress the attachments – the smaller your email is, the better for the environment. Size down photos, limit the spreadsheets and most of all, really think if you need to send anything at all.
  5. Empty your bin and spam folders – do it regularly. you are not going to read those emails anyway, so don’t let it clutter your inbox.
  6. Unsubscribe – not from everything. Just the things you no longer interested in. It’s good for your inbox as well as your mental health and often it is good for your wallet too!
Do you really need to send this email? The carbon footprint of the digital age. 2