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We all know that emails are much better for the environment
than sending a letter - but, could they be made greener still?
That is the question behind research currently underway at
IT giant Sun
Microsystems as part of a project to measure the carbon
footprint of individual emails.
"Email is a great application to try and measure the
carbon footprint of, because it is universal and there are
billions being sent everyday" - said Richard Barrington,
head of sustainability and public policy at Sun in the UK.
"It's not an easy task, but we are looking at the mail
servers, the different software applications used, the network
devices and trying to extrapolate the energy used back to
the email itself."
The aim of the exercise is to try and prove, once and for
all, that email has a significant environmental advantage,
compared to other methods of communication. "Everyone
in IT says that the social and environmental benefits outweigh
the material impact of the technology itself" - observed
Barrington. "But, if we want to prove that, we need to
quantify that. If email is environmentally better than other
types of communication, we need to be able to say by how much."
According to Barrington, the research can also go some way
to promoting wider use of electronic communication as a means
of curbing carbon emissions. "There is a tendency to
always see IT as additional" - he explained.
"For example, when Amazon emerged, everyone said it
would kill bookshops, yet the renaissance in reading that
it helped build, means many bookshops are still thriving.
That's no bad thing, but it does have an environmental impact
because the IT was additional to a business model. We need
to look more carefully at areas like email, where genuine
substitution with other less environmentally friendly measures
can take place."
The research will also hopefully allow firms to benchmark
the carbon footprint of their own email systems against best
practices. Barrington said that the resulting metric should
allow firms to identify the policies and systems they could
implement to ensure the carbon footprint from their emails
are as low as possible.
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