Hi again, one of our customers pointed out something interesting today, something the Brother of the Inventor of the WWW, namely Mike Berners-Lee suggested.
Mike Berners-Lee, who advised on some recent research told the Guardian’s Steven Moss. “When you are typing, your computer is using electricity,”
According to Mike Berners-Lee, a professor in the environment Centre at Lancaster University “When you press send it goes through the network, and it takes electricity to run the network.
And it’s going to end up being stored on the cloud somewhere, and those data centres use a lot of electricity. We don’t think about it because we can’t see the smoke coming out of our computers, but the carbon footprint of IT is huge and growing.”
This latest research reckons Brits send more than 64m unnecessary emails every day, if every adult in the UK sent one fewer “pointless” email a day we would save more than 16,000 tonnes of carbon a year, or taking around 3,300 diesel cars off the road.
Of course these figures are only crude measurements but none the less an important observation?
At green ISP / Green WebHost we try to advise our customers of “good email practice and maintenance”, we limit mailbox size and sending limits etc, not only to make the systems rune more effectively, to cut down on server and CPU use, in turn cutting down on energy use and Carbon Emissions (which we offset if not hosted in one of our solar or geo/hydro servers).
About the research:
Research conducted by expert survey consultants, Censuswide. Using a sample of 3,000 nationally representative British adults (16+), the research was conducted between 14.11.19 – 17.11.19.
Links: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/prof-mike-berners-lee-warns-against-environmental-impact-of-pointless-emails