Saving the environment by cleaning up email inboxes

22.01.2019 | Email

Dmytro Romanovskyi, director and founder
of the «Destra» internet marketing agency

Concern for the environment is becoming more popular every year. In 2012, drawing people’s attention to the problem of CO2 emissions required a UN summit, Hollywood actors, and huge amounts of money to spread the message. Today, interest among people in developed countries is largely sustained by word of mouth.

A few weeks ago, the French Agency for Ecological Transition (ADEME) conducted an interesting study showing how each of us can make a positive impact on the environment without spending any money or making any significant effort.

Email spam hurts not only your nerves, but the planet

According to ADEME, the unwanted emails filling our inboxes contribute to increased greenhouse gas emissions, making all of us indirectly responsible for their environmental impact.

It may sound like a conspiracy theory, but the agency has scientific, measurable evidence to back up this claim.

And it’s not just about spam. Every day, consumers are bombarded with dozens or even hundreds of offers, news updates, newsletters, and videos. Even if someone has voluntarily subscribed to email newsletters and notifications about new content, it is physically impossible to read every email, message, or watch every video.

ADEME fact #1: 80% of emails are never opened.

We wrote more about how sales funnels work and how to turn thousands of readers into a handful of customers in the article "The sales funnel is forever".

The cost of a unit of data storage on any device continues to fall every year. This creates the impression that we can forget about running out of storage and that memory has become virtually unlimited. For end users, whose attention is being fought over by major corporations, that may indeed be the case. However, these companies themselves spend enormous amounts of money continuously expanding the servers and data storage facilities used to store their customers’ data.

Just 0.1% of greenhouse gases in the air is enough to make it toxic to people, animals, and plants.

Although data centers are becoming increasingly energy-efficient and producing less carbon dioxide, their overall footprint continues to grow. And this growth is largely unchecked. Ultimately, operating hundreds of thousands of local storage systems contributes to higher emissions. These emissions, in turn, harm the environment and human health.

Even things like emails take up space in these storage systems. An individual email rarely weighs more than 1 megabyte. And that’s precisely where the main threat lies. It is often the small actions that seem almost harmless that can lead to serious consequences — just like tons of waste and plastic making their way into the world’s oceans.

What does the Environmental Protection Agency suggest?

The agency recommends taking your inbox more seriously and becoming aware of the impact that every email can have on global CO2 emissions.

If we put the figures together and convert them into a comparable measure, global email use is equivalent, in terms of annual emissions, to 3.1 million internal combustion engine vehicles.

The figure is significant, but ADEME is not trying to scare anyone. Quite the opposite. Taking advantage of growing public interest in environmental responsibility, the agency launched a simple social media campaign. Its goal was straightforward: to encourage as many people as possible to clean their inboxes of unnecessary emails and subscriptions. ADEME’s message is that even this small contribution can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions — without requiring any significant effort.

ADEME fact #2: People around the world send more than 200 billion emails every year. Each email generates an average of 3 grams of CO2 emissions. Emails with attachments or messages that are part of an automated email marketing sequence can already account for 20–50 grams.

ADEME fact #3: Running an energy-efficient light bulb for 24 hours is equivalent to sending 30 emails.

Spend five minutes a day deleting a few dozen unnecessary emails, and the planet will become a little cleaner. Do it regularly, and over the course of a year, your impact can become significant. Get your friends into the habit too, and you’ll have even more reason to be proud of yourselves.
And if you run email campaigns, reduce the number of emails you send and keep only the most interesting and valuable content. Your subscribers — and your campaigns — will benefit from it.

We invite you to join this initiative and sort through your inbox. Even better — make it a regular habit. Greenhouse gas emissions may not immediately lead to global warming, but they make the ecosystem we live in less suitable for life. They make the air we breathe dirty and harmful. So why not make a difference together, especially when it's so simple?

Join Destra in the Fight for Clean Air and Healthy Email Marketing

We firmly believe that email marketing is extremely important and effective for businesses. At the same time, no one will unsubscribe from a high-quality, interesting, and useful newsletter. Our team has already made it a habit to unsubscribe from newsletters we don't read and clean our inboxes of old and unnecessary emails once a week.

ADEME fact #4: If every French person deleted just 50 old emails from their inbox, it would be equivalent to switching off 1.6 billion light bulbs for one hour.