Reducing your online carbon footprint

By Ayub Mohamud, Sadeed Akhtar Khan Bibi, Olumide Ola, and Abigail Tait

Email Responsibly

Did you know each email you sent has an average cost of a 4g of CO2e (The Good Planet)? Sending and storing 1500 emails is equivalent to:

Producing approximately 20 plastic bottles (based on a plastic bottle production cost of 82g of CO2e to produce a plastic bottle (Ahangar et al.) or heating an average home for a day (based on average heating footprint of 2.2 tonnes per year (Nesta)

You wouldn’t throw away 20 plastic bottles or leave your heating on so consider the impact of your emails!

Tips to reduce email carbon use:

Be concise and keep emails short, only send images when absolutely necessary. Longer emails with attachment or images can be have a CO2e cost of up to 17g whereas short text only emails can be as low as 0.2 g. 85 times less carbon intensive!

Clean up and delete old emails! You wouldn’t let your bin overflow so tidy up that inbox!

Although spam emails generally have the lower carbon cost we all probably have a very full junk email folder! Deleting junk emails and unsubscribing from websites or newsletters can reduce the number of emails you receive and reduce your online footprint.

Find out more about the carbon cost of emails from the Carbon Literacy Project:

Cloud Storage

Storing our data in the cloud has a carbon cost

Storing 100 Gb of data in the cloud consumes 700 kwh of energy per year (Stanford Magazine) or 0.2 tonnes of CO2e . Equivalent to heating approximately 29 homes! Cleaning up and deleting large files stored in the cloud can reduce your online footprint:

Tips to reduce your cloud storage carbon footprint

• Delete old files that you don’t need anymore. Especially large files like photos and videos
• Check your online photo albums like Google Photos and iCloud to delete un-needed photos
• Check your OneDrive for unnecessary files you no longer need
• Transfer your old files to a hard drive instead of keeping them on the cloud.

You wouldn’t leave your recycling bins at home full so clean up your online storage!

Check out these resources to find out more about the carbon cost of your online habits and what actions you can take with the resources below:

Calculate your approximate online footprint with EcoTree

Stanford Magazine on the impacts of cloud storage

BBC: Why your internet habits are not as clean as you think

BBC: Climate change: Can sending fewer emails really save the planet?