The idea that sending less emails would have a significant impact on the environment was popularised by the book ‘How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything.’ This, released in 2020, was by Professor Mike Berners-Lee, a respected authority on the topic.
Professor Berners-Lee mentioned that every email creates something from 0.3 to 50 grammes of carbon dioxide. This covers everything from small text-only emails to those with a large attachment. By using email, the average person thus produces between 3 and 40 kg of carbon dioxide, as well as other greenhouse gases, a year. This is tantamount to driving between 16 and 206 km in a small petrol car.
Professor Berners-Lee told the Financial Times that his book depended on “back-of-the-envelope” maths conducted in 2010. It caught the attention of a number of media outlets worldwide, which helped reinforce the idea.
Ovo Energy is a renewable electricity company. They estimated that 64 million emails are sent within the United Kingdom every day. A press release from this company in 2019 claimed that if every UK citizen sent one fewer email a day, it would save 16,173 16,433 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. This is the amount generated by over 81,000 flights from London to Madrid. In a survey, 71% of Britons accepted that they’d have no problem with not receiving a ‘thank you’ email if this helped the environment. The ten most unnecessary emails included messages reading only ‘appreciated,’ ‘cheers,’ ‘LOL’ and ‘thank you.’
Whenever you send an email, it follows a chain of electronics that consumes electricity. The email goes from your laptop to a telecoms company and then to a huge data centre run by a tech giant. Finally, the email is read by someone whose computer is using electricity. The electricity thus used all adds up. Evidence of this is the attention given by big tech firms like Google to their environmental reputation; they pay for environmental projects. The carbon footprint of our gadgets and the internet accounts for an estimated 3.7% of greenhouse gas emissions. This is similar to the amount produced by the airline industry.
Susanne Baker is the associate director for climate, environment and sustainability at the non-profit industry body TechUK. She remarked that such data traffic as email “does have an energy and carbon penalty.” She acknowledged the efforts of the technology sector to increase its use of renewable energy rather than fossil fuels; data centres using renewable energy have a drastically smaller carbon footprint. The rising efficiency of data transmission and storage also provides some good news.
The National Grid foretells that by 2030, data centres will consume slightly less than 6% of electricity in the United Kingdom. Emissions from data centres are burgeoning due to increased use of such online media as video calls, games and streaming. So eliminating junk data is a key part of tackling the climate crisis.
People view dark data only once. Ian Hodkinson is a professor of strategy at Loughborough University. He has been looking at the impact of dark data on the climate. The topic aroused renewed interest in the United Kingdom when he was recently interviewed by the Guardian. When he began his efforts a few years back, he thought it was a simple matter. However, it turned out to be “a whole lot more complex.” He is at least certain that data has a negative impact on the environment. 68% of the data used by companies is only viewed once, and he thinks the same is true of personal data.
Professor Hodgkinson found that many people believe data to be carbon neutral. But every piece of data, be it text or an image, has a carbon footprint. When people store things in the cloud, they think of the white fluffy kind. However, in reality, data centres are very hot and consume much energy.
One picture, Professor Hodgkinson remarked, won’t “make a drastic impact.” But if you go to your phone and find a hoard of pictures, “that creates quite a big impression in terms of energy consumption.”
Technology companies are incentivised to stop folk from deleting junk data because the more data they store, the more they pay to use these companies’ systems. Professor Hodgkinson points out that if we’re paying for storage, we’re paying for something that’ll almost certainly never be used again. Most people are unaware that it even exists. He finds it “quite a scary thought” that all the renewable energy in the world couldn’t provide the energy data needs.
It is, Professor Hodgkinson believes, critical that fewer pointless emails are sent since each one creates carbon dioxide. It would be most worthwhile avoiding what he terms “the dreaded ‘reply all’ button.”
