by Ron Daly
Last Wednesday was Earth Day, which is why you couldn't go to any site without seeing a fleet of recycling tips. We decided to do our "green" article today. Call us crazy.
I got this article emailed to me the other day. It says that the amount of spam sent every year is the equivalent of driving a car around the earth - 1.6 million times.
We've been over the amount of CO2 emitted by Google Search (click here for that article), but this is pretty crazy. SPAM? Those goofy messages you get from nobody about pills and car-title loans? How could something like that be detrimental to the environment?
From the article:
The study, which was conducted by consulting firm ICF International, concluded that spam-related emissions for all email users world-wide creates a total of 17 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, 0.2% of total greenhouse gas emissions. (Wall Street Journal's Marissa Taylor, "Spam's Noxious Carbon Footprint", April 15 2009)
Isn't that insane? 17 million metric tons of carbon dioxide! And most of that comes from energy exhausted searching for real messages in the clutter and deleting/sorting the SPAM itself.
Reducing SPAM via filters is one thing, and is very effective. Wouldn't it be great to only get the messages you really want, though?
How much CO2 is emitted as the result of trillions of inane, useless Twitter tweets? (you just know somebody will come up with a number for that)
Every time somebody tweets "Good morning, Twitterville" they're damaging the planet. Time for responsible tweeting, people.
Posted by: Ron Shevlin | May 18, 2009 at 08:34 AM