Go green the email way to save earth

BANGALORE, INDIA: Have you ever counted the number of emails that you send and receive everyday? Considering that every third email sent/received is one paper saved from printing. Then, since the time we started using emails, somewhere around the year 2000, the world has saved countless papers and perhaps countless trees. Of course a positive thought on the eve of the World Earth Day.

In the past decade, all the companies went digital with their official IDs and business mails. This includes the corporate entities, small and midsize companies, and even government enterprises. Each and every department has its own rules and policies for contributing to paperless work and saving trees. One of the most ubiquitous method is sporting the email signature,' think before you print this email'.

A spokesperson from Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a public interest research and advocacy organization that advocates green causes for a sustainable development, shared that email and various other modes and means of online communication have certainly contributed to a low-paper usage environment in today's workplaces, and CSE is no exception.

Talking about the organization itself, the spokesperson added that CSE began its tryst with email in 1986. Almost all internal communication and a considerable amount of external communication here is carried out online. In fact, CSE also carries forward its low-paper usage philosophy by actively practicing paper recycling.

Last month India's Agriculture Ministry had issued a circular asking officials to minimize the use of paper and printers to save environment.

It stated, "More than 15,000 reams of 70 GSM paper have been procured this year for the DAC offices located in Krishi Bhawan. Assuming that pine trees with a height of 15 meters and an average diameter of 30 centimeters were used to create pulp for manufacturing paper being procured in DAC, it requires felling of about 110 such trees every year!" says the circular.

According to the study by Radicati Group, the installed base of hosted email mailboxes in APAC is expected to grow from 675 million mailboxes in 2009, to 998 million mailboxes by 2013 (look at all segments of the Asia/Pacific hosted email market, including: ISP/webmail email, hosted business email, and managed business email).

Sanjay Manchanda, director, Microsoft Business Division, citing a Gartner report, said that the worldwide installed base of on-premises email and collaboration mailboxes had reached 450 million accounts in 2009, and would increase to 621 million by the year-end of 2013.

A report by Tom Soder, a graduate student in the Pulp and Paper Technology Program at the University of Maine had long back mentioned that it would take a rough average of 24 trees to produce a ton of printing and writing paper, and a tree would produce 80,500 sheets of paper.

“I know that in manufacturing paper, the wood is turned into pulp. The yield is about 50 per cent - about half of the tree is knots, lignin and other stuff that is no good for paper. So that means a pine tree yields about 805 pounds of paper. I have a ream of paper for a photocopier here and it weighs about 5 pounds and contains 500 sheets (you often see paper described as "20-pound stock" or "24-pound stock" - that is the weight of 500 sheets of 17" x 22" paper). So, using these measurements, a tree would produce (805/5 * 500) 80,500 sheets of paper,” he said.

All these talks on email advantage sound very economic friendly, and eco-friendly too. However, on the flip side, these emails also put some burden on the environment. According to a study by Manufacturers Association for Information Technology (MAIT), Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are among the highest consumers of data centers. Every email you have in your inbox is saved in some datacentre, which consumes energy and also contributes heavily to the carbon emission.

Apart from that, McAfee’s lateast report on Carbon Footprint of Spam calculated globally the annual energy used to transmit, process and filter spam totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), or 33 terawatt hours (Twh), which is equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes, with the same GHG emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using 2 billion gallons of gasoline.

It may be wise to delete all those unwanted mails so that it would help save the data centre energy consumption. Unlimited space in the email does not mean that you have to keep all the junk and more intact!

So, to make the earth go greener and greener, we have to go for sensible use of email. Like the sheet of paper that causes the destruction of the eco-system, all those email are also contributing to the carbon emission, global warming and much more.

We all need to understand the serious injuries that have been given to the nature in the past, start healing them by continue using emails sensibly, use email signatures, use anti-spams, and various other ways to go green and sustainable.

And also think twice before forwarding all those junk emails! Have a green day.

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