I often tend to think that all things that run digitally are perfectly environmentally friendly, since I don't see massive amounts of junk mail or paper notes piling up. However, even if we only see the sleek screens of the devices we use, unfortunately, our use of the internet results in significant emissions. The main cause are data centers, where organize, process and store data, such as your email inbox. These centers need of course power to operate and cool down. According to the BBC, various studies and Cleanfox, these internet servers account for 2 to 3.5% of global greenhouse emissions, similar to those caused by the civil aviation industry. Naturally, there are data centers running on renewable energy and the RE100, an alliance of influential companies such as Facebook, Google or Apple, have pledged to use 100% of renewable energy as soon as possible, at the latest by 2050. Still, considering that about 60% of emails remain unread in the first place and that there are more than 4 billion email users worldwide, managing one's inbox properly, as strange as it may seem, it environmentally relevant.
Cleanfox is a free service that provides a solution to this problem. If you subscribe, Cleanfox identifies all the newsletters in your inbox, presents them to you, and for each one you can choose with a single swipe whether to unsubscribe and delete, only delete or keep the newsletter. Personally, I always thought I kept my inbox relatively tidy, unsubscribing to newsletters I don't read and deleting unimportant messages. However, when I tried Cleanfox myself, the algorithm identified almost 200 newsletters I was apparently subscribed to (to be fair, from many of them I had just received a single email, such as from automatic booking confirmations). It took me less than 10 minutes to go through all those newsletters and decided to completely get rid of 165 of them. Here are the statistics from my "digital cleanup":
Now, 11 kilos of CO2 saved per year might not seem like a lot, but young trees absorb between 5 and 6 kg of CO2 per year, so by taking 15 minutes every once in a while, you have basically avoided emissions that would take two small trees a year to sequester back from the atmosphere.
So, since it is always a good time to declutter your life and of course, be more sustainable, I encourage you to use this easy solution to clean up your inbox or unsubscribe right away from spam and newsletters that are no longer interesting. In case you do subscribe, consider using the referral code below, as Cleanfox will plant a tree!
referral code: 4C6F38A757