Gelisim News

Save energy by deleting 10 emails from your account!

Many individuals and institutions are working to reduce their carbon footprint and save energy. Asst. Prof. Dr. Serkan Gonen made statements within the scope of "Energy Savings Week", which is celebrated in the second week of January. Stating that digital cleaning will also reduce the carbon footprint, Gonen indicated if everyone with an e-mail account deletes 10 e-mails, the electricity consumption will decrease.

With the global warming problem and the accompanying climate change, everyone needs to change many of their habits. Some of the things to do are to use a bicycle to reduce the carbon footprint, not to wash the dishes, to use public transportation, and not to prefer cardboard cups. In order to manage waste, energy savings are achieved by using digital media for many studies. Many people do not know that cleaning is required for computers, mobile phones and the internet, which are found in all areas of our lives. E-mail services emit carbon emissions through the servers and devices they use. Asst. Prof. Dr. Serkan Gönen, Head of the Software Engineering Department of the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture of Istanbul Gelisim University (IGU), stated that if everyone with an e-mail account deletes 10 e-mails, the electricity consumption will decrease and the carbon footprint will decrease.



Spam and advertising-campaign emails occupy a space in storage areas

When it comes to protecting the environment and waste, most people think of products such as paper and plastic. The digital age we live in has also changed environmental protection factors. It is not known to most people that environmental damage is caused by the e-mail accounts we use every day, the videos watched and the music listened to. Although the use of e-mail provides less carbon emissions than the normal mail service, the servers and devices used by the mail services cause carbon emissions. Asst. Prof. Dr. Serkan Gönen said, “According to the Digital 2022 report, 4.69 billion people have e-mail accounts. If everyone deletes 1 KB of emails, that will free up 49 Terabytes of storage, thus reducing electricity consumption. During the day, spam and advertising-campaign e-mails are received in large numbers to their e-mail accounts. Most of the spam e-mails are automatically deleted by the e-mail services used, but spam e-mails that cannot be caught in between take up space in the storage areas. Marking them as spam is helpful for filtering. Since advertisement-campaign e-mails are sent in mass, their energy consumption is less; however, deleting after you are done will reduce your carbon consumption."



“More energy savings are achieved if a lower resolution is used while watching a video”

Internet and applications, which exist in a large part of life, have become a significant part of social life. Compared to e-mails, applications of watched videos and music listened to produce more carbon emissions in terms of servers. Dr. Gönen said: “Watching videos in particular consumes much more energy with bandwidth and storage. If a lower resolution is used while watching videos, more energy is saved. Moreover, the most well-known messaging application also uses a server to send data, but does not make backups. This means that the energy used by such programs is less than the e-mail environment.”