Think about how much carbon it takes to fly 81,152 flights from London's Heathrow airport to Madrid, about 1,250 kilometers. It's roughly equivalent to using 3,334 cars—both use about 16,433 tons of carbon per year. That is also how much carbon is wasted every single day by people in the United Kingdom sending wholly unnecessary emails, like that useless "thank you" message some overly polite people simply can't not send.
This is based on research done by UK independent energy provider OVO Energy, quantified in the chart above by our partners at Statista. The results are based on a few assumptions, such as the UK population, percentage of email users among adults (87 percent), and census data on how many "unactionable" (useless) emails people send per week (11.29, but they rounded down to 10). Assume that one-millionth (0.000001) of a metric ton—1 gram—of CO2E (carbon dioxide equivalent) is used per email. That's 64.3 million unneeded emails a day, which is 64 tonnes, a.k.a. metric tons, of carbon daily. You can see the staggering waste. (A metric ton is 1,000 kilograms, which is 2,205 US pounds; it's larger than a US ton, which is 2,000 pounds. Nomenclature is exhausting.)
Statista pointed out that the methodology's assumptions are a little wild when it comes to the number of email users, but even conservatively cut it down to 24 million regular emailers based on those working in jobs where email is (still) a big deal, and you still get 8,760 metric tons of carbon per day—only 43,260 flights to Madrid.
Extrapolate this to the population of industrialized countries such as the US, Australia, and China, and the impact is profound. There are 244.5 million email users in the United States; if we each send the same quantity of 10 waste-missives daily, we are wasting 892,425 metric tons of carbon per year.
OVO Energy is doing its part by using this info to launch a campaign called Think Before You Thank. It has a new Chrome extension to help: Carbon Capper shows a warning when you're sending a potentially unactionable message (at least in Gmail), which it defines as any message less than four words long.
The company also provided a list of the 10 least-necessary email messages ever:
- Thank you
- Thanks
- Have a good weekend
- Received
- Appreciated
- Have a good evening
- Did you get/see this?
- Cheers
- You too
- LOL
This doesn't even take into account the sheer amount of waste that goes into posting on social media. What's the carbon footprint of every thumbs-up "like" you give or get? The mind boggles.
BTW, that estimation on the amount of CO2E generated by an email as one-millionth of a tonne comes from Mike Berners-Lee, a professor at Lancaster University and an expert in carbon footprints and greenhouse gases. He based it on the time used by the person typing, the electricity used by the device, and what's needed to run the network and servers that transmit a message. He happens to be the brother of Tim Berners-Lee, the gentleman who invented the World Wide Web.
The bottom line: Think twice before you send any email. Thanks!