Tip #76 Unsubscribe From Newsletters (Except For This One)

Did you know that you can help fix the climate by just unsubscribing from unwanted emails? Emails have a significant carbon footprint. Last year, I already made the newsletter about deleting the emails, we can do a step forward and try to prevent receiving unnecessary emails. It’s like with trash - the best one is the one that is not created. If we treat this way our emails, we can save quite some energy.

Did you know that spam filtering saves 135 TWh of electricity per year? That’s equivalent to 13 million cars off the road.

There are about 2.3 billion email users in the world. The average email size is about 75 kb. So, imagine if everyone deletes around 10 unwanted emails (spam and non-spam), it could prevent 1,725,000 GB of data from being stored in servers around the world.

And that’s cutting about 39,035 metric tonnes of CO2e which is equivalent to 19356 tonnes of coal burnt every day to generate that amount of electricity (assuming that fossil fuels are being used). That’s a crazy amount of C02e released in the atmosphere every day that could be saved (source).

Let’s do a bit of math:
• Average spam email = 0.3g CO2e
• Standard email = 4 g CO2e
• Email with attachments such as pdf, links = 50g CO2e

Unsubscribe from emails you don’t need, delete spam emails on daily basis, don’t sign up for newsletters you aren’t going to read and delete emails after reading them.