Can we really save the Earth by deleting emails?
You probably heard during the weekends that there are scientists who got arrested for giving a warning that we only have 3 to 5 years left to save the earth. There were also tips on how a simple individual like you can do something to make the world better by deleting emails.
But how can a deletion of emails, a small effort, help the world breathe? Let’s see the answer to that as we finish reading this post.
What is the composition of the email?
An email has electrical energy. It is the electrical energy that allows us to run a computer, use the internet, and store the data from email services on multiple servers.
Those servers are in large data centers, which consume a lot of electricity daily. And electricity is still created by fossil fuels, resulting in global carbon emissions (CO2e).
Carbon emissions are greenhouse gas emissions from human activity that can damage the environment. It can be factories, cars, etc., including emails.
Each carbon emission is equivalent to grams of carbon dioxide per mail.
In 2008, McAfee projected that 62 trillion spam emails are sent throughout the globe. The typical spam email produces 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in each message.
Thus, spam energy usage totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours per year worldwide (kWh). This is the same amount of power consumed in 2.4 million houses, resulting in the same amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as 3.1 million passenger automobiles using 2 billion gallons of gasoline.
Moreover, according to the Science Focus report, a science-based magazine, if you send over 65 emails, it consumes the same energy as driving a mile in your vehicle.
What happens if you delete ten spam?
Let’s say that there are around 2.3 billion email subscribers globally. The typical email is 75 kb in size. If you delete 10 unwanted emails, 1,725,000 GB of data will be deleted from servers globally.
The energy required to store 1 GB of data is around 32 kWh. As a result, there’s a 55.2 million kWh less energy you could produce to run those servers.
And it translates to a reduction of around 39,035 metric tonnes of Carbon Dioxide Equivalent (CO2e), or 19356 tonnes of coal burned per day to create that amount of power. Every day, you can save that amount of CO2e discharged.
If everyone deleted 10 emails, 55.2 million kWh could power almost 61,000 houses.
Conclusion:
So to answer the question, “Can deleting emails actually save the earth?” yes, it can. You can really help the earth breathe by simply deleting your spam as much as possible because it reduces electric energy consumption.
This practice may be new and need adjustable for us, but there’s no right day of deleting emails than today.
