Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Eco-Theater Footers

You know what I'm talking about, those silly e-mail footers that read something like:

P Please consider the environment before printing this email  

I did some back of the napkin analysis on these silly buggers:

Data Quantity Notes Source
Emails Per Day 40 Emails/Day https://review42.com/how-many-emails-are-sent-per-day/
Length of Please Consider text 64 Bytes Assumes UTF-8 encoded text
Working Days Per Year 200 Days/Year
Emails Per Year 8000 Emails/Year
Extra bytes sent per year 512000 Email bytes/Year
Transmission Cost 9.31E-07 Wh/Byte Adjusted downwards for a decade of efficiency improvements, units converted to Wh https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jiec.12630
Storage Cost 2.78E-11 Wh/Byte Units converted to Wh http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph240/jiang2/
Total Energy/Year 0.477 Wh/Year
Paper 0.032 Wh/Page Assumes an average size of an e-mail is ~ 1 page, and that the energy costs for 20lb paper are larger enough than that of paper used in journal production to make up the difference. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/01/19/the-hidden-expense-of-energy-costs-print-is-costly-online-isnt-free/
Break-even point 14.9 Emails Not-Printed
0.2%
Grams of Carbon/Wh 0.2252252 g/Wh
Carbon Weight 0.107399 g

It turns out, that the carbon cost in sending these works about to about 0.1g / year for a person sending 40 emails a day for a working year of 200 days (8000 e-mails).  Oh, and if you use Outlook, and it sends multi-part mime because you prettify your e-mails, then double it.  In order for this to balance the energy cost (w/o the doubling), it has to prevent someone from printing about 15 emails.  Considering that I've not printed a single e-mail for more than a decade, and almost all of my colleagues operate in a similar fashion, it seems unlikely that it would even have this efficacy.

It's stupid, it's not really saving the world, and it's just more stuff to not read.  So, as I say, eco-theater.

    Keith

1 comment:

  1. मधुमेह क्या है
    https://thehealth-solution.com/madhumeh-kya-hai/
    क्या आप जानना चाहते हैं कि मधुमेह क्या है (Madhumeh kya hai) और मधुमेह के कितने प्रकार है? मधुमेह टाइप 2 के लक्षण क्या है और डायबिटीज का इलाज क्या है मधुमेह को ब्लड शुगर या डायबिटीज भी कहते है

    ReplyDelete