As we now live in a world where sending emails is more popular than sending a letter, we may take the view that our progression to communicating on-line is more efficient and environmentally friendly than our previous pen to paper habits, and to a large extent it is. Emails have a smaller effect on the planet, contributing 4g CO² per written email, which is 60% less polluting than sending a letter. If you absolutely have to print an email off then make sure it is done with recycled paper.

However we are sending and receiving more emails daily than we would have done letters. This overall is reducing our demand for paper and mail transport, so over time, we are creating resource use, though the technology needed for us to send emails, in itself requires large and complex resource usage, counteracting the benefits of emails. How about investing in an energy saving gadget to reduce the energy use of your computer when idle? The fact that sending an email is free also means we receive more of them than we ideally want, being bombarded daily by 100’s of junk newsletters and spam sent from marketing companies, all of which we send straight to our spam or deleted folder.

I calculated a week ago that across my 2 email accounts I receive 250 emails a day, 90% of these being junk, including travel newsletters, discount emails and newsletters which I signed up for and no longer read.

Totalling on average:

So by unsubscribing to multiple mailing lists and sorting out my spam box (though ensure you only open emails from trusted sources, as not to download any viruses onto your PC), I was able to reduce my daily email total to 75, with roughly 50 of those being newsletters that I read periodically but are of use to me.

Overall saving 50g CO² a day equating to a saving of 18kg CO² per year which would be the equivalent leaving a Tv on for 4 ½ days straight.

If everyone cleared out their inbox of unwanted junk newsletters, which over a week when pressing un-subscribe rather than delete, takes around 20 seconds extra per email, no more than 10 minutes overall, the whole UK population when calculated with my daily emails could save 316 Ton CO², which equals the running emissions of an average house for 24 years, or a 10 hour 747 plane journey.  (Though this figure is a highly rough estimate as not all the UK population have email accounts or they may receive many more emails per day)

Every Little Helps, so get un-subscribing from unread newsletters today.

Read more on the footprint of spam emails at:

http://www.twosides.info:8080/content/rsPDF_130.pdf

Sources:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_292378.pdf

http://www.geekosystem.com/email-carbon-footprint/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2010/oct/21/carbon-footprint-email