Greenhouse gases have far-ranging environmental and health effects. They cause climate change by trapping heat, and they also contribute to respiratory disease from smog and air pollution. Extreme weather, food supply disruptions, and increased wildfires are other effects of climate change caused by greenhouse gases.
I believe we must do everything we can to help the environment and prevent climate change. One very simple but surprisingly effective way of doing this is done through deleting emails.
An email has electrical energy. It’s this energy that allows a computer to gain access to the internet and store data from email service providers. The email services use multiple servers from around the world as large data centres to store everyone’s daily emails and archived emails. A majority of these services and data centres are powered by electricity created through fossil fuels, result in global carbon emissions on a massive scale.
In 2008, McAfee projected that 62 trillion spam emails had been sent in total, 349.6 billion of those being in 2008, with 90% of those messages generated by “bot networks”. Importantly, the typical spam email produces 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in each message.
It’s estimated that 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.
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.
If we all make a conscious effort just to delete unwanted emails, our global energy consumption will be reduced on a noticeable level.
The energy required to store 1 GB of data is around 32 kWh. So if 1,725,000 GB were deleted, that would translate 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.
About Us
Our name is Valuuti and we want to do some good in the world and help fight climate change.
We’re a small start-up brand with an important mission — help nature and fight climate change! Specifically, we want to work with endangered animal charities, plant trees, clean up beaches and start/aid carbon capture and other environmental regeneration projects.
We also want to increase awareness through our environmental blog — talking about important issues, environmental wins and Valuuti updates. Please follow us along for our journey!
In the next few months, we’re launching our sustainable clothing brand, each design linked to its own unique cause and charity. We’ll have:
- Tree hoodies that when purchased, a real tree will be planted.
- Elephant hoodies that support Elephant Conservation charities
- Other services that will fund climate projects and general ideas that do good.
Thank you for reading and we hope you follow our journey!
The Valuuti team.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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