The carbon footprint of emails

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Submitted by: Sam Upton February 26, 2020

Article taken from The Page

Discover the hidden environmental cost of digital communication.

New research commissioned by energy company, OVO, has revealed that sending and receiving emails has a huge carbon footprint. Over 64 million unnecessary emails are sent by Brits everyday, and the study found that UK adults could make one small change to the save over 16,433 tonnes of carbon per year. (OVO Energy, 2019) This phenomenal amount of carbon could be reduced simply by each adult sending one less ‘unactionable’ email per day.

The study found that almost three quarters (72%) of the UK are completely unaware of the carbon footprint associated with email, with 49% of Britons confessing to sending unnecessary emails to a colleague or friend within talking distance every single day.

Sending just one less email a day would reduce our collective carbon output by the equivalent of 81,152 flights to Madrid or taking 3,334 diesel cars off the road.

“Whilst the carbon footprint of an email isn’t huge, it’s a great illustration of the broader principle that cutting the waste out of our lives is good for our well-being and good for the environment,” says Mike Berners-Lee, author, researcher and brother of Tim, inventor of the World Wide Web. “Every time we take a small step towards changing our behaviour, be that sending fewer emails or carrying a reusable coffee cup, we need to treat it as a reminder to ourselves and others that we care even more about the really big carbon decisions.”

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