Is the eco-email footer bad: Please consider the envirmt before print.."

hardydrew

We've all seen these footers on emails:
"Please consider the environment before printing this email"
with a small picture of a tree or such.

I'm being asked if we should implement across our corporate email system.
Thing is, the extra tag at the end of peoples emails means every email takes more energy to send/view etc than it otherwise would.
Also corporate email is most often backed up so unlike spam this footer is bulking up other systems all over the place.

My question is, on a global scale are we saving trees (quantity of which is arguable) with this footer only to waste a teeny bit of energy with every single email sent and stored on the internet every day?

BoB_BoT

such a line would be miniscule in the context of storage and energy consumed to send it. look at it this way, if the email is printed, you're wasting more toner to print that extra line on every email printed. Using more toner, means more use of resources, more packaging, more paperwork on the printer toner ordering forms, on the producers side etc.. If you want to reduce paper used and to save the environment, enforce printing limitations, work station power saving policies, allot people printing resources where they have to request more, yes it's bureaucracy but it will be more effective.

People print an awful lot of crap they don't need, and they'll redraft it, and reprint, and reprint, and a page gets crumpled a little, so they reprint. You have to change the mindset of the workers to ease of the printing, not a little line that says "consider the environment before printing". Also, paper is a renewable source, i'd be more concerned about the amount of power the printers are using. Are your printers economically and environmentally friendly? maybe set up a printer that uses scapped paper and low toner for "general printing" and another for presentation / reports / official if you follow.

But to answer your question (yes i know i've being ranting) adding a line of text to an email, will be insignificant in terms of storage and energy use. If anything the one or two people who may change their habits, or think twice before printing may be enough to balance against what you lose in storage.

mordeith

hardydrew wrote: »

Thing is, the extra tag at the end of peoples emails means every email takes more energy to send/view etc than it otherwise would.

Surely the energy required to send an email is the same no matter how much text it contains? There may be an issue regarding extra storage space on servers and such but regarding energy in sending emails, surely there can't be a difference.

hardydrew

mordeith wrote: »

Surely the energy required to send an email is the same no matter how much text it contains? There may be an issue regarding extra storage space on servers and such but regarding energy in sending emails, surely there can't be a difference.

Bigger emails take longer to send and therefore use more energy on the network cards transmitting/receiving at the other end. Not to mention taking more time to backup everynight etc. etc. More text = more energy no matter how small.

I dunno - on one hand you are forcefully appending a footer to every email, could be 10000 emails per day for big companies, and as you say people who are ignoring this and printing anyway are wasting yet more paper and toner.
On the other hand you have the possibility that someone might read the footer and not print a couple of pages that they were going to??
I'm beginning to turn against this footer idea. We're only fooling ourselves.

Point taken on the other ways to save energy though.

seamus

In my personal opinion, such a footer is redundant.

There are some people who print all of their mails before they read them.

There are some people who print important mails and file them

There are some people (like me) who never print their emails.

Having a "please consider the environment" footer won't change the habits of any of these people, so it's just an exercise in PR, not any kind of concerted attempt to make a difference to the environment.

As hardydrew points out, if you have a company of say 2,000 employees who each send ten emails per day, then that company send's 20,000 emails per day.

Appending the footer to an email might require and extra 0.01W of energy per mail (I haven't a clue if this is even remotely accurate). So per day, that footer will use an extra 200W of energy. Over a year, that's roughly an extra 50kW of power used by that company. That's an extra €6.62 per year. Of course, since the receiving company has to use power too, the total cost of all of those mails is 100kW. If 500,000 companies worldwide add this to their footer, then that's an additional 50GW (gigawatts) of power wasted in a year.
For comparison, the average nuclear power plant generates around 12400 GW per year.

Worldwide, 50GW is not a large figure. Though it might let you travel through time about 40 times.

Overheal

Between storing the 8 odd bytes of data, transmitting it, storing it, and displaying it, you may just use up a whole fraction of a milliamp :eek:

Honestly I'd look elsewhere if you wee trying to make savings for the environment.

mordeith

seamus wrote: »

Worldwide, 50GW is not a large figure. Though it might let you travel through time about 40 times.

But where would you get a flux capacitor?

Overheal

a quick google reveals that in 2007 global electricity capacity was about 30,000 billion Kilowatt Hours.

Anti

If you use a system like steelhead which caches certain infomation there is nothing extra being send though.

hardydrew

Overheal wrote: »

Between storing the 8 odd bytes of data, transmitting it, storing it, and displaying it, you may just use up a whole fraction of a milliamp :eek:

Honestly I'd look elsewhere if you wee trying to make savings for the environment.

Agreed on that, so my response to corporate should be no to the footer if their reasons for putting in on there are environmental savings as there are much better ways of actually doing this.
Yes to the footer if its a PR stunt to try promote ourselves as being green, but it will actually impact negatively on the envirmnet albeit in a miniscule way.

Anti

If you want to become green go to a paperless office. This worked great when i worked in microsoft. Also being energy efficient, like making sure office lights are turned off when people leave and making sure all computer are off/hibernating over night. Saqme with havign printers in power save mode after 5pm.

Capt'n Midnight

The extra energy is minimal as the data lines run 24/7. You should be more worried about that the email takes sightly longer to arrive because it's longer.

But in reality people won't print out less, but rather more since the footer means more emails will now go onto page two.