Management of emails

Emails form now an integral part of daily practice of professionals across Europe, assessing their carbon footprint is therefore crucial to reduce the impact of VET digital practice on the environment. It is estimated that every time a solely text-based email is sent, it emits 4g of CO₂e and goes up to 50g if it contains multiple attachments. Given that a person’s average annual email usage produces between 3 to 40 kg of CO₂e, it equates to driving a small petrol car for 16 to 206 kilometres.

Nonetheless, as pointed out by Rodrigues Viana, Boucher & Cheriet (2023), the carbon benefit of taking the time to delete 1000 emails would be of five grams CO₂e. In the meantime, using a laptop for 30 minutes to delete them would emit 28 grams of CO₂e. This means that manually deleting your emails can actually become counter-productive as using the computer would consume more energy. It remains difficult to quantify precisely the carbon footprint of emails given that ICTs are developing constantly, and that energy efficiency of data transmission and storage is constantly improving.

The eGreen initiative therefore suggests that professionals implement simple and convenient processes that would greatly reduce the number of emails sent and received automatically rather than allocating too much time to the task of deleting them.