Another week has passed, another poll has closed, and we made our research upon
What is more Eco? Email or Fax?
In the case of emails, even if you count in the energy use of the computers involved, it is still much less than that of old-fashioned fax or snail mail. In the case of faxes, there is the paper and toner, as well as the electricity used by the machines. E-mail is clearly much better, so why should we spend the time demonstrating that? And is that really the final answer of this week’s issue?
When we are talking about regular, common-sense email, everything is nice and shiny, the birds are singing and the trees are dancing. But what about spam email? This is the one that needs to concern us, due to its multitude and frequency.
“The average business email user is responsible for 131 kg of CO2 per year in email-related emissions, and 22 percent of that figure is spam-related. This spam energy is equivalent to the emissions that would result if every business email user burned an extra 3.3 gallons of gasoline annually”, according to ICF and MacAfee. The same report has studied the CO2 spam email emissions of 11 countries and the level of spam-related emissions generated in any country is usually proportionate to the number of email users in each country and the percentage of a country’s email that is spam. “Countries with greater numbers of email users generally use more energy for a global average of 22 kWh per user per year.”
Once the spam emails have been sent from the zombie PCs and conventional mail servers, it takes an average of three seconds for a user to view and delete a spam message. Although spam filters block approximately 80 percent of spam before it reaches the user, the massive quantities of email spam and the increasing ingenuity of spammers leave a large number of spam messages in end user inboxes. Approximately 104 billion user hours per year go to reading and manually deleting spam.
Spam filtering also makes up a significant portion of PC energy use — up to 5,542 million kWh annually or about 16 percent of overall spam energy use. But compared to the energy that users consume searching for false positives and viewing and deleting spam messages, the energy expenditure of spam filtering seems like a small price to pay.
The average GHG emission associated with a single spam message is 0.3 grams of CO2. That’s like driving three feet (one meter); but when multiplied by the yearly volume of spam, it is equivalent to driving around the earth 1.6 million times.
Spam filtering saves 135 TWh of electricity per year. That is equivalent to taking 13 million cars off the road. If every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter, organizations and individuals could reduce today’s spam energy by 75 percent or 25 TWh per year, the equivalent of taking 2.3 million cars off the road.
The same study, conclusions that “the energy required annually to create, send, receive, store and view spam adds up to over 33 billion kWh”, that’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes, with the same GHG emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using 2 billion gallons of gasoline.
In the second part of our article we must return our face to faxing and see how Eco-friendly is that way of communication. Of the top of the internet’s mind, there comes this statistic: over 15 million trees felled each year in the United States just to get enough fax paper. That is shocking! Of course, if we take it as a whole, fax machine is well-known to be an evil killing machine for our trees. But, you see, things have evolved lately and nowadays you can fax someone over the internet. It’s very easy, almost the same as using an email account, like Yahoo or Google Mail – the software producer gives you a platform that you can use as simple as any other software on your computer. Squidoo.com gives us many other details over this procedure that resembles the elementary use of an email address. This is one way of reducing the carbon footprint of a fax machine.
Also, Advsuv.com tells us that the era of those robust, energy-consuming, tree-killing fax machines has passed away and new ways of sending a fax page have rose. Amongst the various advantages of the new Internet fax we find: “First and foremost, the cost of an additional fax is completely cut off. No additional charges for fax machines, fax paper, printer, ink, etc. Because Internet faxes are sent as mixture into a soft copy e-mails are easier to distribute and organize. A pile of paper could be saved. In this way we can guarantee us a bit ‘of the feeling that we do something to save the environment as well.
Users of traditional fax machines will not be plagued by problems like lack of fax paper, the cost of additional phone lines, fax transmission errors, etc. All these problems are practically nonexistent, if you have sent or receive faxes online.”
Looking at this problem on a whole, we might come to some conclusion like:
- If you think of spamming for your publicity, think again and DON’T – it’s not only annoying, but also a big energy consumer.
- Spam filters save us time as well as CO2 emissions.
- Regular emails are more eco friendly, but they aren’t all Green – the servers, the peripherals, the traveling on other servers until it gets to your inbox – all that consumes precious energy, thus has CO2 emissions.
- The fax concept has updated over the years and nowadays fax machines are more and more non-consumers.
