Our lives are full of email.
We receive them at home and work.
We send them to work colleagues, family, and friends.
Some send them as part of our business or marketing roles.
We complain that there is way too much.
Yet, we rarely think about the environmental impact of this form of communication.
According to this article, someone who receives 126 emails/day (including spam) is using 825g of CO2 which is equivalent to driving a car 1.2 miles.
Tips to Reduce the Impact
One Shade Greener at Home has a chapter dedicated to changes in the office. The tips below come from that chapter.
- Reduce Email Accounts – Do you have multiple emails? Maybe you started years ago with Yahoo and then migrated to Gmail, or you had a childhood address that needed to be upgraded when job searching. If so, consider going in and deleting an account you no longer use.
- Clean up your Box – Delete emails you no longer need, clear out your sent file, and delete the items you have sent to your trash (they stay there until you formally remove them!). If you don’t empty the trash regularly, set a habit of doing it once a week, maybe on your physical trash day.
- Unsubscribe – We can quickly find ourselves on all kinds of email lists, from store coupons to newsletters and more. As those emails pop into your inbox, ask yourself, “Do I want to continue receiving these?” If no, go to the bottom of the email and click “unsubscribe.”
- Sending Emails – When you send emails, the most impactful change is reducing the file size of attachments or not attaching anything – this will significantly reduce the email size. Another tip is to not copy a lot of people on a note. When replying, don’t “reply all” unless required.
- Consider Your Email Provider – You can visit this site to look at the rating of your current email provider and compare it to other alternatives. There are several lesser-known providers with very high ratings. This is an option for your home email, and you could talk to the technology team at your company to advocate for an efficient provider for your work email as well.
Your Turn
Have you ever considered the environmental impact of your email?
Which of these tips seems easiest to implement?
Do you think unsubscribing and cleaning your inbox could also relieve some mental clutter?