By 2018 almost 600 billion e-mails have been distributed around the world. This massive statistic does not come without an environmental impact. From the huge PCs at data centers to the small lithium batteries in smartphones, E-mail consumes electricity and its consequences on greenhouse gas emissions are far from insignificant.
As soon as we decide to send an email, we don’t think about the roaming electronic code of millions of kilometers that crosses multiple servers that consume energy.
By sending an email, you must first use electricity to create and send a draft. The email gets sent to your service provider who reviews the information before sending it on to the service provider of the recipient. Both actions also consume a lot of energy as an email has the capability to traverse the globe. Your recipients’ provider in turn reviews the email before sending it to the receiver who must use electricity still to open and view the email.
Without forgetting that the gigantic data-centers that need to be constantly kept cool: they alone represent 2% of the greenhouse gas effect on the planet. This energy-guzzling operating chain leaves import affects on the ecology.
Studies on this subject have already been conducted and reveal that a simple email of 10MB can produce close to 15grams of CO2. These numbers only increase with the size of the email, the number of attachments added, and the number of recipients of the email. On average, a business of 100 employees today produces almost 14 tons of CO2 per year only by sending emails. That is the equivalent of driving millions of kilometers by car! And its not finished, because the worst offense is not related to the emails that we read, but the spam that we ignore! The production of spam consumes the energy equivalent of 2.5 million American homes and the gas consumption of 3 million cars. The CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) is engaged in the process and each person can participate in the decrease of sent email, or in their weight.
This appraisal needs taken seriously, especially now that measures exist to limit the damage.
Good ecological practices for sending emails.
• Keep attachments in a NAS
In the business world, sending large emails of large quantity is common practice. To promote the environment, simply making these ancillary documents accessible through a link is the best and easiest solution. It’s also convenient because instead of cutting or compressing documents, you store them directly as they are on a NAS server. For the record, the NAS is like a personal cloud accessible to users who have permission to log on.
The NAS can store files of large size up to 10GB. With this system, you send an email to your recipient informing them that a file is available on the NAS.
This type of online storage in addition to being practical is a gesture for the environment. The NAS is a little intensive. It needs less electricity than a conventional server to manage data storage. Among the NAS, Helixee is particularly less intensive than the others with 5 Watt-hour, which represents €0.54 per month and €6.42 per year in electricity to power helixee.
• Reduce email sending
There are e-mails that don’t matter. About 10% of the e-mails sent do not provide any useful information. This is often the case with emails sent automatically for example. Their deletion would save nearly a ton of annual CO2 for a structure of 100 people.
Helixee a NAS for the environment
With the helixee NAS, data storage has become simple. Made in France, helixee allows automatic data backup with all types of digital devices. Just install an application on the devices and the trick is played. Its configuration interface is simple which does not clamp the advanced functions of the NAS. It takes only 30 minutes to put the server and its applications on the devices in operation.
Its Wi-Fi hard drive detects new files on your tablet, smartphone and PC and centralizes them automatically on the system. It also includes a private social networking feature that allows you to securely share your data.
helixee was also conceived in the light of its ecological impact on the environment in order to be the most eco-friendly possible.
