“Did you know that 70% of inbound business email is junk that’s roughly 20 billion a month and a huge carbon footprint.”
It’s probably not something you really think about, your carbon footprint while working from home, but now more than ever we may be sending extra unnecessary emails.
If every one of us in the UK sent one less email a day, it’s reported we would save 16,433 tonnes of carbon a year – the same as 81,152 flights to Madrid.
The research, conducted in part by Professor Mike Berners-Lee, (the brother of the man who invented the internet) found that UK adults send around 11 unnecessary emails each day, usually with simple one or two word replies such as ‘thanks’ or ‘you too’.
Not sending these very British, polite but unnecessary emails would save the energy required from servers, networks and systems such as the cloud. Just one email may not use much power but every action has a carbon footprint and we could all make this one small change to have an impact.
So if we could make a difference with just one email a day, just think what we could do if we banned the spam.
70% of inbound business email is junk that’s roughly 20bn a month – 10 times the amount of unnecessary emails we send and a huge carbon footprint.
Imagine what processing all that junk mail is contributing to global warming. When will governments legislate against these power wasters?
But until they do, have a think about how you can help, do you need to CC in all those people, does that email really need a reply? We can all play our part by not being so polite but reducing our carbon footprint.
