The hidden environmental cost of your overflowing email inbox

When consumers think about ways to reduce their carbon footprint, lowering their car usage, eating fewer animal products and reducing their waste likely come to mind.

But there’s another, perhaps easier, way to cut your emissions: delete old emails.

Your overflowing email inbox is a lesser-known climate villain, consuming energy and collectively producing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide every day for years, even decades.

Last year, 4.2 billion email users sent and received 333 billion emails a day, a number that’s expected to hit 400 billion by 2026, according to projections by Statista. Meanwhile, the data centres and servers that transmit and store each email consume significant amounts of energy.