PAC Doverie participated in Digital Cleanup Day for another year

For another year, the employees of the PAC Doverie joined the global initiative Digital Cleanup Day, which took place in mid-March. 

The aim of the campaign is to draw people's attention to the carbon footprint they leave. It also explains how they can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide generated when sending and storing unnecessary emails and files, for which servers use energy. 

The total volume of deleted unnecessary data from the PAC Doverie is 163 GB, the storage of which would generate about 130 kg of CO₂ per year. 

This amount is equivalent to driving 650 km by car, the electricity consumption of a standard household for several days, the carbon absorption of 5–6 trees in a year, or the emissions of a plane flying a distance of 1040 km. 

The organizers of Digital Cleanup Day indicate that the average carbon footprint of an email is 0.3 g CO2 (carbon dioxide). If there are attachments, it can reach 50 g CO2.

Calculations show that if every person in the world deleted 10 emails, this would be equivalent to deleting 1,725,000 GB, which would reduce CO2 emissions by an amount equivalent to 19,356 tons of coal burned every day. 

Sending 65 emails is roughly equivalent to driving 1km. Globally, email use generates as much CO2 as having an extra seven million cars on the road.

If every British adult refrained from sending an email containing only the word “Thank you”, more than 16,000 tonnes of CO2 would be saved per year, the equivalent of 81,000 flights from London to Madrid, says Anneli Ohvril, one of the leaders of the Digital Cleanup Day project.