How many kilometers do you travel with your emails?

A recent study by ADEME calculates the carbon footprint of an email precisely. The result will surprise you!

It’s known to a few, but automobiles are far from being the number one pollution source in the world. Today, digital data exchanges and storage pose a real dilemma for the planet because they consume enormous amounts of energy.

ADEME (the French Environment and Energy Management Agency) has quantified that sending a 1 MB email results in 19 grams of CO2. Multiply that impact according to the size of the data. A 10 MB photo, and you’re emitting 190 g of CO2.

For example, a WeTransfer transfer of 2 GB would theoretically emit 38 kilograms of CO2! Well, all this may seem a bit disproportionate, but it is important to consider the average duration of data storage. For days and nights, servers need energy to stay powered. This is why WeTransfer (not to mention others) limits the validity of a download link to a few days to reduce the carbon footprint. Similarly, cleaning out your emails is good for the planet!

Hundreds of kilometers in a Renault Clio!

Starting from this premise, we can extrapolate the number of kilometers traveled by a French person. According to a 2022 statistical study, an employee in France receives an average of 50 emails per day, each weighing about 500 KB. Multiplied by an average of 218 working days per year in France, this amounts to about 5.32 GB exchanged annually.

That’s 5320 MB x 19 g = 101,080 grams of CO2 (or 101.08 kg).

The best-selling car in France in 2023, the Renault Clio emits an average of 120 g of CO2 per km. Therefore, the emissions from emails of a professional in France are equivalent to about 842 kilometers. Think twice before sending an email from now on…

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