reduce your carbon footprint this weekend | declutter your inbox
When was the last time you checked your personal emails? During the pandemic, the personal emails in my inbox have piled up like the dishes in my sink. They’re pushed off to a distant ‘later’ or ‘tomorrow’ as in, “I’ll get to that sometime later” or “I’ll definitely take care of those tomorrow.” But recently, I’ve found myself actually taking care of things in a reasonable amount of time (for whatever definition of ‘reasonable’ we’re even still working with), and somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered hearing something about how your undeleted emails can contribute to your carbon footprint.
If you’re thinking, “what the heck?” let me give you a quick primer:
Emails are stored on servers that are housed all around the world. The energy that it takes to power these servers and data centers is mostly electricity powered by fossil fuels which thus contribute to carbon emissions.
The servers storing these emails require air conditioning to prevent them from overheating, which requires gallons of water.
By deleting your old emails and cleaning out your spam folder, you reduce the number of emails stored on those servers and thus reduce the amount of electricity needed to power those servers. Over time this can really add up, just like any other effort to reduce your carbon footprint like eating less meat and choosing to travel by public transportation over an individual car.
How to declutter your inbox for good:
Unsubscribe from email lists that you never engage with. There are programs that can do this for you like Unroll.me or Clean Email.
At least once a week, clean out your inbox and clear out your junk and spam folders.
Turn off email notifications for services like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc unless there’s something specific you’re tracking. Most of us log into those social media platforms regularly and/or get push notifications, so there’s no need to be notified via email as well.
This isn’t a global solution to greenhouse gas emissions because we know roughly 100 companies globally are responsible for 71% of the world’s emissions. I’m always leery of placing too much responsibility of burden on individuals because the truth is so we need a systematic change, but we can still play our part. Maybe it’s a drop in the bucket, but collectively we can fill an ocean.
in sustainability,
