Yes you got that right! If you’re not a big fan of planting trees or you aren’t into all that environment stuff, don’t feel guilty. Here’s a wonderful time-consuming way of doing your bit for the Earth. Now you may be wondering exactly how all those emails filled with shopping ads, and tons of work from the boss, can help in saving the planet.

Let’s start with a fact. 1 email is said to produce 0.000001 tonnes of CO2 equivalent. Now while the figure seems insignificant, there are gazillions of emails that are making their way every second, through the portals of the World Wide Web. Consider this hypothetical scenario. If every person on the planet sends one less of those ‘futile’ emails, bam! with the carbon emission that is saved in the process, 81,000 flights could easily take off from London to Madrid!

How did emails become so detrimental to the Earth?

Let’s ask you a question. When you sit at your desk and go ‘click click’ and hit ‘send’, do you ever stop to think where the email goes? What happens to it? Sure it reaches the individual it was meant for, but well, do emails just disappear into an abyss of electronic data? Yes, they do. And do they accumulate into hordes and hordes of gigabytes? Yes, again.

And here comes the hair-raising fact. An average corporate worker receives close to 121 emails per day. (well, receives and sends). An Indian has a carbon footprint of 1.5 tonnes of CO2. Now let’s remind you, there are 7 billion people on the planet and everyone seems to be living for a pretty long time. It takes no math whiz to come to the conclusion that we are doomed! This carbon literacy as they call it, would make you aware of exactly how an individual contributes to the carbon emissions of the planet and the possible solutions to reduce it.

Scary figures

Science came out with the Thought Experiment. To send a typical email, the electricity needed is 4g of CO2. If you’re sending fancy pictures, this spikes up to a carbon footprint of 50g. 65 emails energy requirement are equal to the fuel spent by driving 1 km in your car. Imagine an extra seven million cars on the road. Insane. But imagine it. Can you begin to fathom the amount of carbon emission that would be produced? Well, that’s how much emission is produced around the world due to EMAILS!

What do we do!

There’s a solution folks to this impending crisis that will soon consume the planet. Delete. Delete unwanted emails, spam, thrash. Don’t send those ‘thank you’s and unnecessary ecards. There’s social media and while the flintstones may have been compelled to be using the email as a mode of communication, let’s spare a moment and remind ourselves, a WhatsApp text, or a call, or hell, maybe even a vocal message will go a long way. It’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to making a difference.

Go right now to your inbox and delete 10 unwanted mails (yes right now). If every single person across the globe does this, 1,725,000 GB of data would be deleted, thus freeing up space, thus saving energy and thus being the first baby step to saving the Earth. Let’s start a revolution, a digital riot of sorts, a cycle that will never end. One conscious effort could set the wheel in motion, for what could be the biggest courtesy our generation does to the blue planet.