The environmental impact of a two word email is astonishing.
Our digital world has a huge amount of trash. It eats into precious storage space on our smartphones, laptops and tablets, wasting energy at the same time.
The Let's Do It World Network wants us to consider the carbon impact of saying thank you and is also asking people to reconsider the environmental impact of their unused files. On their list of targets is your email inbox and the constant spam that clogs it up.
“If each British adult would abstain from sending out a “Thank you” email, we would conserve more than 16,000 tons of CO2 per year - equal to 81,000 flights from London to Madrid. Are really all the emails we send necessary?” says Anneli Ohvril, one of Digital Cleanup Day's project leaders.
We've all found ourselves trapped in a pointless email chain of thank yous at some point. Too polite to not send that two-word message, over 64 million unnecessary emails are sent by Brits each day according to energy supplier OVO.
Almost three-quarters of people in the UK were completely unaware that these millions of messages could be increasing the carbon footprint of their inbox according to research commissioned by the supplier.
"Whilst the carbon footprint of an email isn't huge," said Mike Berners-Lee, emissions researcher and writer, "it's a great illustration of the broader principle that cutting out the waste in our lives is good for our wellbeing and good for the environment."
According to Berners Lee's book, The Carbon Footprint of Everything, a normal email has a footprint equivalent to 0.3g of CO2 emissions. This can rise to 50g, however, with the addition of a large attachment. This figure looks at everything from the power in data centres to the computers that send, filter and read the messages.
Cutting down on the number of unnecessary emails you send is one way to reduce the CO2 emitted by your emails but the spam clogging up your inbox could also be a source of emissions. Over half of all email traffic is considered spam say figures from Statista. With 239.6 billion messages sent around the world, that's a lot of spam.
Deleting these messages frees up space on the servers that store email data and could help reduce the amount of CO2 produced by systems keeping us all online.
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