Carbon Footprint of Junk Mail
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Hey folks, in the spirit of looking for more low-hanging fruit to easily reduce our carbon footprint, I started thinking about junk mail: both paper and digital. some astonishing facts about the waste created by both of these below. Easiest things to do: Put up a "No junk mail" sign on your mailbox, and unsubscribe from all the spam emails and delete your inbox.
"Mail advertisements create 51.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year — equivalent to the emissions generated by heating about 13 million homes during the winter"
https://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/reducing-the-junk-mail-footprint/" By the estimated 62 trillion spam emails sent in 2008, that’s as much as driving around the Earth 1.6 million times." :
https://pollybarks.com/carbon-footprint-email/
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@jamiroquai It's interesting to look at both physical and digital mail impacts. I definitely assumed that paper mail had a big impact but never thought as much about the digital side of things.
The good news about the wide scale transition to digital mail is that it lets us improve our footprint by looking at the data centers that power those emails.
For example, Google cloud services powers a huge amount of the digital mail going on in the world. They are pushing to use 100% renewable energy to power all global data centers. Being able to optimize energy usage through machine learning is also helping!
