Tip #4/53 Delete after reading

How many emails a day do you receive? And how many
of them do you delete?

As e-mails are immaterial, it’s quite difficult to imagine that they have a real effect on our electricity consumption.

E-mail providers need to store our emails, which takes energy 24 hours a day. Therefore, more emails in your inbox = more servers running = more energy used.   

A study by ICF International and McAfee reveals that storing 1GB of e-mail consumes 32.1 kWh per year. According to Orange, if every single person in France deleted 50 emails, the energy savings would be equivalent to turning the Eiffel tower’s lights off for 42 years, or to New York City not consuming any electricity for 4 hours. 50 e-mails are nothing compared to the hundreds and hundreds of unnecessary messages that most people accumulate in their lifetime. (source) 

Would you keep this mail in the “real life”? Most likely, no. You would keep only the most important documents. So let’s treat the e-mails the same way as the “real life” ones and get rid of those we don’t really need. 

So deleting unnecessary emails is an easy way how you can reduce your electricity consumption. Who is in?