A new school year means tons of email and the dreaded email attachments.
In a recent Mother Jones article by Keira Butler posted on August 9, 2010, the author discovered, "...that sending an email attachment of 4.7 megabytes—the equivalent of about 4 photos taken on a point-and-shoot digital camera—creates as much greenhouse gas as boiling your tea kettle 17.5 times."
The basic issue involves the sending and storing of data in email attachments. 'Steve Duplessie says, the important lesson is, "Data is physical. When you have a million copies of the same thing, that's a big problem."' We are sending & storing so much data that the servers are sucking massive amounts of energy.
The good news is we have less need for attachments with virtual sharing through sites like Flickr and YouTube, servers are more efficient and newer technologies allow servers to share the workload.
Keep your emails green. Think about every attachment you send. If it isn't absolutely necessary, don't do it. Post the info once and share the link.
Happy new school Year!
17 comments:
This concept is so interesting. I never thought about the amount of energy an email attachment could use. I always assumed using digital media rather than printed was environmentally sound. Now I will be more discerning when adding attachments onto my emails.
It's hard to believe that emails could use up so much energy. I often send emails with attachments since I am on the executive board in my sorority. I will definitely think twice about the amount I am attaching to them in the future.
This is so interesting especially when you think about the number of professors at Drexel who email out their syllabus at the beginning of the term when they could just as easily post it on bbVista for everyone to access it and eliminate the harm to the environment. I think In out society we've been trained to think that everything that we access online instead of in print is automatically environmentally friendly, but this is not always true.
I find it so hard to believe that more people are unaware of these statistics. I feel if more people knew about the harmful effects a simple attachment can do they would adjust ASAP. Awareness is one thing that stops people from doing what is best. I know a bunch of friends, and teacher who take eco-friendly to the next level and if they knew about this I'm sure they would band attachments from their e-mails.
Things like this really get you thinking about the vastness of your carbon footprint. Almost everything you do, from opening the refrigerator to surfing the web uses energy. There is more to reducing your footprint than recycling.
It is a true eye opener that emails are not as green as we think. Many people such as myself believed that emailing was the green way of contacting people. I think a step I could take would be to take the time to unsubscribe to certain daily emails that contain attachments that I usually delete without reading.
I'm so glad to find out this massive energy waste on email attachments since I was used to be a attachment abuser. It's nice that the sharing community base is growing so less attachments are used. But it might be even nicer if there are information private sharing community sites for business communication or school use. So everything is just uploading or downloading with 0 attachment.
I have to admit that sending an email with one or more attachments never left me with as much of a guilty conscious as when I forget to recycle water bottles. I agree that being aware of the environmental harms digital media can have is key because, like so many other aspects of everyday life, it can create an impact on our environment.
I think people have started to become aware of this issue and are trying to fix it with new technologies such as google docs or Drop Box. for those of you who don't know Drop Box is one big sharing system. If someone joins drop box and you give them access to your drop box, you can just drop your file or document into it and the person or group has immediate access to it. This is perfect for a class, a group project or just sharing files with someone. My sister and I have started to do this instead of emailing things we want to share with each other. It also only allows a certain amount of data to stay in there so you are forced to clean it out every once in a while making sure it's not sucking too much energy with old unnecessary files. I think this would be a great alternative to emailing teachers documents, I know that some schools have started to utilize this technology, for example all the classrooms at The Art Institute of Washington use drop box for any files that you are trying to send to a teacher. We do have blackboard for submitting certain assignments but we are still constantly emailing our teachers assignments as blackboard is certainly not always reliable and some teachers don't even use it. Drop Box is fast efficient and you get a notification on your computer that a file has been dropped. It's really a great alternative to email attachments.
I would have never known that attaching a file actually used this amount of energy. It is great to make people aware of this fact since I am sure I am not alone on this one. We think that because it is all done from our laptops we are actually benefiting the environment by not wasting paper. I will try to find other ways of sending the usual attachments in my emails.
I am very green-conscious and try to limit my carbon footprint as much as a can; therefore,I found this to be so outrageous. The fact that we are trying to be green by limiting the amount of letters we send really isn't making much of a difference. I mean it surely does help however being in a major where we are constantly sending attachments and project information over the web makes it extremely hard. After reading this i am going to try to limit the amount of attachments i send out as well as limit the size of each one.
This is interesting to me because although sending so many emails with attachments can use so much energy, what about the alternative? Think about if you were going to write a letter to someone and mail it to them instead. What about all of the energy it takes to cut trees to make paper, packaging it, making stamps, the energy of your car to go drive to mail the letter, the energy that the mailman uses to go pick up your letter from the post office, and things of that sort. Which is more green?
I think the biggest factor in this issue is the lack of public knowledge. Most people do not know that e-mails relate to the energy being used by servers and it's relation to greenhouse gas.
I had no idea that emails used any energy based on attachments whatsoever. Interesting how as the internet becomes more and more available and comfortable for the user, the more we take it's services for granted. This makes me think of bbvista - we should really start utilizing sharing via online hosting.
I had no idea that attachments use more energy. I do it all the time. I know that it takes a lot of energy for servers to work, and I have always wondered what that comparison is to actually sending a letter by snail mail. I think that it is a good thing that companies such as google will put at the bottom of emails a small quote about thinking of printing the contents, and the trees that you could be saving by choosing not to print.
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