What is the carbon footprint of an email?

According to the Carbon Literacy Project, a standard email generates approximately 4g of CO₂ ; with a bulky attachment, it produces up to 50g of CO₂. Sending a 1 MB holiday photo to ten friends is equivalent to traveling 500 meters in car. Because, even addressed to a colleague a few meters away, your e-mail sends data to the data centers of google or Yahoo which are located in the United States. It therefore travels thousands of kilometers passing through tens of routers, servers and others computers who also consumeenergy to operate and which need to be cooled.

Emails generate 410 million tonnes of CO₂ per year

The problem is compounded by the amount of messages piling up in our mailboxes. In France, an Internet user receives an average of 39 emails per day, according to ContactLab. A total of 281 billion emails were sent worldwide every day in 2018, according to research firm Radicati Group. Taking this average of 4 g of CO₂ per e-mail, so that’s 410 million tonnes of CO₂ per year that are generated. By comparison, the transport world air transport produced 859 million tonnes of CO₂ in 2017, according toIATA. However, this figure is largely underestimated because it does not take into account the Spam, which represent half of the messages received. However, even unopened, these unwanted messages produce 0.3 g of CO₂ ! In total, 80% of emails are never opened.

Each French person stores 10,000 to 50,000 e-mails unnecessarily

Finally, e-mails continue to expend energy on their storage. ” Each French person keeps between 10,000 and 50,000 unread emails in their inbox “, assures Edouard Nattée, the CEO of the startup Foxintelligence, which publishes in particular, Cleanfox, theapplication automatic sorting of e-mails. All this data is stored in data centers, which consume 200 TWh per year and produce 0.3% of greenhouse gases, according to the site. Nature.

How to reduce the carbon footprint of your e-mails?

• prefer the telephone (possibly texting) to email;
• reduce the size of attachments, for example by compressing images or sending a hyperlink instead of a document;
• unsubscribe from all unnecessary newsletters and subscriptions;
• do not keep old e-mail addresses in which unread mails pile up;
• reduce the list of recipients to what is strictly necessary;
• regularly sort your mailbox and eliminate all unnecessary messages;
• use an application that cleans your mailbox like Cleanfox.