How on Earth, (you may ask), does sending an email contribute to climate change? Well, the answer is quite simple. Emails use energy to send (i.e. electricity from your device), and more importantly energy to store (in the mysterious cloud). Now I am certainly not advocating for never sending an email again. They are quite useful in our society! However, there are two simple tricks we can all use to reduce our digital impact.
Unsubscribe!
How many companies are you currently subscribed to who bombard you with promotions direct to your inbox? Do you even read any of them? If the answer is no, then simply unsubscribing will help to reduce the email traffic sent to you, and subsequently stored in the cloud. As a bonus, your inbox will become much easier to manage!
Delete!
I am guilty of reading emails and not bothering to delete them. It’s way too easy to leave this chore to later. Eventually I’ll inevitably have thousands of unnecessary emails in my inbox that I am never going to look at again. If this is you, I highly recommend an email cleanse. I recently deleted nearly 5000 emails! It felt great to declutter and I am also decreasing the energy needed to store those redundant messages in the cloud.
In the grand scheme of things, my 5000 deleted emails, and the dozens of unsubscribed promotional emails won’t make a noticeable impact on carbon emissions. However, imagine if every person with an email account adopted this approach. The impact would be much larger, especially if this concept is expanded to much larger files on your online storage, such as Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive.
So why not take on the challenge to unsubscribe and delete old emails, and know that you will be playing your part to make your own local impact on the environment.
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Local Impact Sustainability 