25 Apr 2008
We all know that emails are much better for the environment than sending a letter, but could they be made greener still?
That is the question behind research currently underway at IT giant Sun Microsystems as part of a project to measure the carbon footprint of individual emails.
"Email is a great application to try and measure the carbon footprint of, because it is universal and there are billions being sent everyday," said Richard Barrington, head of sustainability and public policy at Sun in the UK. "It is not an easy task but we are looking at the mail servers, the different software applications used, the network devices and trying to extrapolate the energy used back to the email itself."
The aim of the exercise is to try and prove once and for all that email has a significant environmental advantage compared to other methods of communication.
"Everyone in IT says that the social and environmental benefits outweigh the material impact of the technology itself," observed Barrington. "But if we want to prove that we need to quantify that. If email is environmentally better than other types of communication we need to be able to say how much."
According to Barrington, the research can also go some way to promoting wider use electronic communication as a means of curbing carbon emissions.
"There is a tendency to always see IT as additional," he explained. "For example, when Amazon emerged everyone said it would kill bookshops, yet the renaissance in reading it helped build means many bookshops are still thriving. That's no bad thing, but it does have an environmental impact because the IT was additional to a business model. We need to look more carefully at areas like email, where genuine substitution with other less environmentally friendly measures can take place."
The research will also hopefully allow firms to benchmark the carbon footprint of their own email systems against best practices. Barrington said that the resulting metric should allow firms to identify the policies and systems they could implement to ensure the carbon footprint from their emails are as low as possible.
LATEST STORIES ABOUT TECHNOLOGY
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE
LATEST JOBS
TODAY'S TOP STORIES
HIGHLIGHT
Model X sports Back to the Future-style "falcon doors" and is set to go on sale in 2014
INSIGHT
INSIGHT
The science and practical application of an improved method for the specification of power and cooling infrastructure for data centres
A look at alternative approaches to managing energy for cost and/or sustainability reasons in data centres
WHAT DO YOU THINK? Add your comment
html or plain text any implications
I'd be interested to see the impact on companies persistence to use html rather than plain text just so they can attach the company logo.
Posted by diffid, 13 Jan 2009
Carbon footprint of email
It is extremely important that companies like Sun carry out and/or support peer reviewed analysis of the amount of energy that is consumed and the volume of greenhouse gasses that are emitted by IT. We may find that sending a snail mail letter could possibly have a smaller carbon footprint. A recent Study by Pitney Bowes indicates that each piece of mail delivered by the USPS results in the emission of 20grams of CO2. JupiterResearch projects that e-mail marketing spending will grow from $1.2 bln in 2007 to $2.1 bln in 2012. IDC recently estimated that nearly 97 billion emails were sent daily worldwide in 2007 and that over 40 billion of them were spam. IDC also found that an email with a 1MB attachment sent to four people within a typical medium to large enterprise would have a footprint more that 30 times larger than the 5.5 MB you might assume. The message itself is stored on the local machine, then the email that contains the document. In a typical enterprise copies of all emails are kept on the central email server, which, in order to keep the email system up and running, includes a redundant server. Desktop files, where the original document sits, are typically backed up daily to a server. The servers are then periodically backed up to tape and taken offsite. As a result the original 1.1MB email has a footprint eight times bigger than itself. Add up the local and backed-up copies of the email sent to the four colleagues, and that footprint is 30 times larger than the original email. Then there is all the temporary data created as the emails and backup systems send data back and forth across the local and wide area networks. In transmission, all manner of communications overhead is introduced: signaling data, packet addresses and headers, security codes, router caches, and management and tracking information. All that computing and communication takes electricity... and lots of it. According to research by the Uptime Institute data center power consumption, is currently 1.4% of all power consumption in the US, and is expected to double by 2010. With the U.S. national average CO2 emission for electrical power at 1.34 lbs per kWh it is important that we know how much energy sending an email consumes. A typical 50,000-square-foot data center, for example, gobbles 4 megawatts of power a day ?the equivalent of 57 barrels of oil per day. Shouldn't we know how much of that capacaity is consumed by email... and spam? Political candidates and their various supporting organizations will spend over $4 billion dollars on political advertising this year. Much of it will be on email campaigns. Given the fact that both candidates for president say that addressing climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions wouldn't it be appropriate for them to address the carbon footprint of their political advertising. If they spend $50 million dollars on a direct mai8l campaign, the mailing of the 100 million pieces of mail it would buy would result in the emission of 2000 tons of greenhouse gasses. I for one would be interested in knowing what the carbon footprint of a $50 million dollar email campaign would be. Don Carli Conference Chairperson SustainCommWorld: The Green Media Show http://www.SustainCommWorld.com
Posted by Don Carli, 19 Jul 2008
email vs chat
Someone suggested to me during a recent exchange of e-mails that we use something like google chat instead of communicating back and forth through e-mails. I wonder what the difference would be between e-mail and chat communications.
Posted by Christopher Zurcher, 28 Apr 2008
Another example of "Greenwash"?
Is this really a useful way for Sun to spend its time and money? What are the alternatives to email they propose - a fax, letter or chat? The methodology will be open to criticism and bias and the results no more than marketing based on bad science. If Sun is serious about energy usage and climate change then it should look to participate in more open and credible research that is better conceived and more credible.
Posted by Brendan Dunphy, 29 Apr 2008