Environmental impact of communications
A number of companies in the postal and logistics businesses have made great strides into ‘greening’ their operations and reducing the carbon impact of their business/market. Although the press and the industry have received this positively the question is do customers really care about the environmental credentials of the delivery companies – or is the mail through our doors just seen as junk?
Although the alternative technology channels are seen to be more environmentally sound the reality is that often their impact is unseen but significant. McaFee recently undertook to calculate the environmental impact of an email and came out with the figure if 9 grams of CO2 per email – when this is compared with a typical letter which is somewhere between 20 and 25 grams of CO2 it can be seen that physical mail is actually not that bad. The question is how do we convince consumers and businesses of this – are we too late to get the message across?
Is it too late in the day to change the mind of the consumer as to the environmental credentials of the mail or are there things that we can do as an industry to show the benefits of mail as a communications medium. What sort of things should we be doing and who should be doing it – is this down to companies or should there be an industry wide response?
I am struggling to understand the McaFee figure of 9 gms of CO2 per e-mail. Any idea how that is calculated? I thought the differential between e-mail and physical mail would be far greater?
I think very intresting this issue, too. Nigel, read this McAfee´s blog about subject: http://siblog.mcafee.com/?p=916
I have independenlty written a white paper on the environmental impact of Email if you are interested in the detail. In this I take the total power consumed by the Internet in the US (only figures available from reliable Government sources) and assume a percentage used for email. Then look at the number of messages estimated by IDC along with an estimation of the time taken to compose/read each email, and a simple calculation using this methodology suggest between 5 and 7 grams for each email. It is interesting that if you reduce the amount of Spam the figure actually goes up quite significantly as 85% of emails transmitted across the Internet are considered Spam.
One of the problems I encountered was that the sources found related to different years and therefore they may not be truly accurate, however any carbon calculation can only ever be an estimate so as an indication it is as accurate as it can be.
The physical mail figure is based on the carbon calculations of the various posts which span from 17 grams in the US to over 35 in some of the European countries. The 20 – 25 is a weighted average of all those that I found published.
Thanks gentlemen for clarifying my understanding of the CO2 implications of e-mail. Will think much more carefully before sending ones that say ‘Yes’ in future!!
Was interesting on the McAfee blog to see spam e-mail quantified at 62 trillion emails in 2008. Aside from the fact that they are a complete pain in the neck to everyone, and a waste of time, they are obviously very carbon unfriendly too. Whilst I know that regulation of the Internet is a herculean, almost impossible task, maybe governments need to be addressing this as a part of their ongoing climate negotiations, even if only as a footnote?
All,
Please feel free to join the Environment Group, under the group tab at the top of the page. I am going to be leading this group and hopefully we can start to generate some debate concerning Posts and green initiatives. Please feel free to share your opinions in ‘blog’ form too!