While email is more environmentally friendly than paper mail, it is not as "green" as commonly believed. Sending emails with attachments requires energy to power computers, servers, and storage centers used in transmission and downloading. The infrastructure and scale of global email usage results in significant carbon emissions. To reduce this environmental impact, people should send fewer and smaller emails, clear out inboxes regularly, and avoid unnecessary online activities like excessive social media use.

1. E-mails not all that 'green'
uring Deepavali time,
Dthese days, we are greet-
dated with electronic
inun-
ing cards, and we too send
several such e-cards our-.
selves. We believe that by
switching from paper to elec-
tronic mode of communica-
tions, we are "green", and that
in doing so we have saved pa-
per and thus done a bit to save
the environment and gener-
ate less C02.
Well, perhaps just a bit but
it appears not as much as we
are led to believe. "E-mails
are not so green" reports a COSTLY INFRASTRUCTURE: The use of personal
news item in a recent issue of computers, servers, storage centres cost energy and
I the journal Science. hence more C02 emission. - PHOTO: AFP
The often-quoted estimate
by Mr. Matthew Yeager of
Computacentre (Europe's
largest IT infrastructure
SPEAKING OF SCIENCE
company) claims that send- estimates that in a 100-peo- plus application - all lead to
ing an e-rnail attachment of ple company where each em- wastage in efficiency. Com-
4.7 megabytes (MB) creates ployee sends on average 33 bine this with what Keira
as much greenhouse gas as e-mails a day and receives 58, Butter points out in The At-
boiling a tea-kettle 17.5times. the greenhouse gas emission lantic, you get an idea of how
His study claims that an e- linked to emails would be much energy is lost in elec-
mail of 1 MB would be the around 13.6,tons of C02 per tronic communications. Yes,
equivalent to the emission of year. e-communication does save
19 grams of C02. And if that And a study by the French trees, is more efficient and
mail is copied (cc'd, as we government's Environment produces less C02 than pa-
type) to 10 people, its impact and Energy Management per-based communication.
is 73 grams of C02. Agency (Ademe) suggests But the scale of it is what
Well, I was astonished to that if each of these 100 em- needs to be kept in mind.
read this, since I too believed ployees sent 10 per cent less Take Facebook usage. It is
that I was saving the planet a emails for a year, they would estimated that its users alone
bit byusing my PC to commu- save C02 emissions equiva- are uploading over 1000 pho-
nicate with people, instead of lent to one round-trip flight tos per second, or 3 billion
"snail mail". between Paris and New York. photos per month. Recall the
Keira Butler explains the Talking of C02 emissions tea kettle boiling equivalent
matter in an issue of the mag- by airline traffic, I was re- of sending a 4.7 MB attach-
azine The Atlantic (Augustl2, minded of what Dr. Jeremy ment, and you get the idea.
2010). She says "Sayyou send Nathans of Johns Hopkins What should we do?
a picture to 20 people by wrote to me (bye-mail, not So what should we do?
email. snail-mail) when we invited There are several ways of sav-
Each one has to download him to come to Hyderabad for ing energy and cutting down
it. That means the use of delivering the Champali- greenhouse gas from our end.
equipment such as personal maud Lecture in 2009. First, free up the memory
computers, servers, storage He declined coming in per- space in the computer. Clean
centres (not to mention son, stating that he is doing up the e-mail box (in and out
printers for hard copy, if his bit to the environment by mails) periodically. Not doing
used)". All these cost energy not flying all the way from these means greater demand
and hence more C02 Baltimore and back. We had for storage and energy used
emission. him lecture electronically by that storage.
It is a matter of scale. Mat- (video talk real time; I should Second, limit the number
thew Yeager points out that now estimate how much C02 of recipients for each e-mail
the current amount of data he would. have saved by not (cut down the number of cc's
storage across the globe is 1.2 flyingbut video-Iecturing).· . to).
zettabytes (ZB) of stored da- To get an estimate of how Third, cut down tlie size of
ta. This requires equipment -much power is consumed by the attachments (boil less
with a mass equivalent of 20 electronic communication, tea- water).
per cent of the island of Man- go to the website < http://Fourth:enterthe URL ad-
• hattan, New York City! Put whatsthisgottodowithstora- dress directly rather than use
another way, this level of gefiles.wordpress.com/2010/ a search engine. Cut down the
I stored data is the equivalent 08/wired-uk-july-2009-in- times you "Google", "Yahoo"
of all of the US' academic li- ternet-electricity.pdf >. etc.
braries multiplied by half a They point out that 30 per Fifth: don't leave your
million! And the data storage cent of the input power in computer and accessories on
is expected, by the year 2020, each computer is used in overnight (as many offices
to grow to 35 ZB (incidental- powering the chips, 30 per do), not even on ' sleep mode'
ly, zetta is a sextillion, or 10 cent of the energy entering a (even if that eats up only 1-10
raised to the power 21 (or 1 microprocessor is turned into watts).
followed by 21zeros). heat, and that 123billion kilo- Sixth: laptops use 15-60
The scale increases thou- watt hour (kwh) per year is watts while desktops use
sand-fold each time from mil- how much electricity it takes 250W. Cut down the power
lion or rnega, to billion (giga), just to keep the Internet's by doing more 'offline' work
trillion (tera), quadrillion servers running. than online. Finally, remem-
(peta), quintillion (exa), sex- And traditional IT environ- ber Facebooking and Twitter-
tillion (zetta), septillion (yot- ments, says Yeager, tend not ing burn carbon and make
ta) and so forth). to be overly efficient in scale. C02. Talk more and twitter
E-mail is thus not all that Traditional infrastructure - less!
green. And e-mails with at- server plus storage plus net- D. BALASUBRAMANIAN
tachments are worse. Yeager work plus operating system dbaJa@lvpei.org