The average Wageninger contributes to sustainability in one way or another. While one person may eat (more) plant-based food, the other may buy only second-hand clothing, or ride a bicycle instead of using the car. Everyone does what they can or want to, but I have a completely unexpected tip to offer which will help even the staunchest non-sustainability people improve the climate: delete emails!
E-mail consists of data, which travels across the globe through glass fibre and is stored in huge data centres. These data centres use astronomical amounts of electricity to send, process, analyse and store data. Moreover, they need a stable climate, which requires lots of cooling water. As you are able to access your email 24/7, the data centres are operational around the clock. Being able to read an email from your bank at any time is nice, but the data centre cannot discern between that email and a promotional newsletter from clothing store WE from 2014. It is completely unnecessary to store that type of data.
I am no stranger to keeping unnecessary emails. Quite the contrary. I even have two email accounts. One for the more serious things such as banking, Idealis emails, DOU and the physiotherapist. Current inbox score: a respectable 1135 messages. The other is for nonsense: coupons, social media, Marktplaats, newsletters etc. Score: 59425 messages. Almost 60 thousand emails gathering dust on a daily basis in an energy consuming data centre.
It took me 45 minutes to remove them all.
The question is how much energy you save by removing these emails. The calculations from studies vary from 0.1 grammes to 50 grammes of CO2 per email stored for a one-year period. The higher estimates are mostly for emails with many attachments. If we consider the lower estimates, and assume and average storage cost of 2 grammes of CO2 per email during a year, deleting 60000 emails that would otherwise have been stored for 5 years saves 600 kilos of CO2 (60.000 x 2 x 5). According to the ANWB, a car emits 115 grammes of CO2 per kilometre driven. A quick calculation shows that, in a five-year span, I saved 5000 car-kilometres. One trip to France per year.
Whether deleting my 60.000 spam emails is a small bucket or a drop in the ocean, each drop counts.
Oscar Delissen is a third-year Food Technology student who likes cooking with sharp knives and colourful festival shirts.