Did you know that you can help fix the climate by just unsubscribing from unwanted emails? Emails have a significant carbon footprint. All the worlds daily 246 billion emails dump a total of 986,000 tons of carbon into the atmosphere every day! And since emails contribute to carbon emissions, you are actually helping save the planet by unsubscribing to unwanted subscription emails rather than just repeatedly deleting them or marking them as spam.
How exactly do these emails contribute to carbon emissions? A regular email produces 4 grams of CO2 on average but long messages and emails with attachments produce up to 12 times more! This carbon impact is generally attributed to the daily operations of the gigantic data centers that store almost everything on the internet. The same goes for all things digital too, not just emails.
The electricity these data centers consume to store, transfer, process, and analyze all this data is enormous. Not to mention that to keep everything cool and running efficiently requires a lot of water. Just to send one email there are thousands of data-centers around the world taking care of every step of the journey from the sender’s inbox to yours. None of these calculations even include the greenhouse gases and carbon emissions that were produced when the data center equipment was manufactured.
If you take an extra second to opt-out of mailing lists you don’t want, you’ll feel better not receiving millions of emails, you’ll save time not having to delete the same email over and over without even opening it, and you stop the email from being sent unnecessarily.
Sending and receiving an email contributes to carbon emissions. 75% of emails are never even opened. They are causing global warming for absolutely nothing! In other words, unsubscribing helps to reduce your carbon footprint, and also the carbon footprint of the person or company sending the email.
A Leave Me Alone App analysis report says:
From our anonymous usage data of nearly 10,000,000 analyzed emails we know that around 8% of our users’ inboxes are subscriptions and 36% of those are unwanted. That means up to 28,397 tons of carbon is emitted the atmosphere every single day for emails people do not want and do not read. That is the same as producing nearly 3 billion plastic bags or almost 1 million people taking flights from London to Paris!
Here are the raw numbers from the analysis based on worldwide usage:
- 246.5 billion emails sent every day
- 19.72 billion are subscriptions (8% of 246.5B)
- 7.1 billion are unwanted (36% of 19.72B)
- 28,397 tons of carbon produced daily (7.1b x 4g for 1 email)
- 2,839,680,000 plastic bags (28,397 tons / 10g for 1 plastic bag)
- 946,560 people flying from London-Paris (28,397 tons / 0.03 tons for 1 person flying)
The Leave Me Alone app helps you unsubscribe from spam emails with a single click. It’s also got a few other useful features and planet-saving options. For instance, you can use a carbon footprint estimator to see how much you can reduce your carbon footprint by. Not only does it calculate your email emissions but also other activities like using plastic bags, drinking coffee, and driving a car for comparison.
You can also donate at the checkout to plant a tree because trees are incredibly important in our fight against carbon emissions and climate change. One tree can filter up to 16kg of carbon out of the atmosphere in just a single year and all of them together help clean the air we breathe, filter the water we drink, and absorb harmful carbon from the atmosphere. The app has partnered with One Tree Planted who plant trees all over the world. In addition to the trees the users help plant, the app will plant an additional one for every 10 its users do.
