24. October 2023
Matthias Wagener
How we handle our daily data directly impacts our sustainability, which is why we are focusing on GREEN DATA in our VAST GREEN sustainability initiative. In this blog post, we will discuss our communication behavior, especially with emails.
Who doesn’t know it? Countless emails land in our personal and professional email inboxes every day: newsletters, vouchers, notifications, invitations, emails from customers, distribution lists, and so on. But did you know that, on average, an email consumes 27 grams of CO2 per email? The true significance of this number becomes clearer when we look at how many emails are sent daily. According to Statista, in 2020, there were approximately 300 billion emails sent worldwide per day! Just for comparison: A car requires 1,500 grams of CO2 for a 10-kilometer journey.
So how can we reduce our CO2 emissions in terms of emails? We’ll show you some ways you can save CO2 in your email inbox:
Email is still the primary means of communication for many organizations, and forecasts show continued growth – up to 392.5 billion emails in 2026!
If we all receive and store so many emails, it costs energy – and begs the question: what is the half-life of an email? Can’t we just delete them when we receive them? Yes, of course, it’s not an easy question to answer. I think we can all agree that, in addition to the 47% of completely unnecessary SPAM emails, many everyday emails don’t have a very long life after a deadline. They don’t need to be sorted or filed. Maybe it’s just a matter of discipline: deleting emails that are no longer needed can help reduce the amount of storage space needed on email servers and in data centers. Minimizing the amount of data stored can reduce the amount of energy used to store and run email servers.
Getting things right is half the battle, and data center operators are responsible for much of it: efficient email management, proper archiving, backup and retention policies can all contribute to sustainable optimization of the entire data center.
As individuals or organizations, we can contribute to greater sustainability by choosing email service providers that are committed to sustainable data center operations. Energy efficiency and environmental friendliness are becoming increasingly important criteria when selecting service providers, including minimizing the eCO2 footprint associated with sending and receiving email.
Email attachments are a major contributor to data transfer, data storage and energy consumption. We see it every day in our mailboxes: From graphically beautiful footers to oversized files to forwarding long outdated attachments in email threads, we are sending data that is old and unnecessary.
What to do about it? Delete it!
Most email programs will ask you to forward with or without attachments. In most cases, it’s more about our convenience than the need to forward an attachment anyway.
The digital infrastructure in most companies today also makes it easy: to send data, Vast Forward relies on Google’s cloud service, or you can simply use one of the countless file-sharing services, from Wetransfer to SwissTransfer, which are free up to a certain data limit.
Please don’t print emails if you can avoid it! Yes, it’s still done. If email has represented progress, it’s the fact that important correspondence can be stored and organized digitally. It may sound trivial, but you, as an individual or as an employee of a company, can minimize paper consumption, which leads to less deforestation and associated carbon emissions.
At Vast Forward, we’ve been largely paperless since 2015, but we still meet clients who work differently from time to time.
So, there are ways to incorporate sustainable email practices into our everyday life (at work or at home). Of course, the environmental impact of even the most sophisticated email management is only one aspect of a comprehensive sustainability strategy.
But sustainability is first and foremost about our awareness of the importance of digital sustainability.
