In 2024, junk emails will emit more carbon dioxide than 4.3 million cars.¹

That’s right. All the spam, limited-time offers, and newsletters that invade your inbox every day aren’t just annoying, they have a real impact on our environment.

How Junk Emails Waste Electricity:

Every time someone sends you a spam email, they’re wasting electricity.

When junk mail gets sent to you, it gets stored on a server. These servers run 24/7, consuming massive amounts of electricity that’s usually powered by fossil fuels.²

Because we burn fossil fuels to send and store emails, these junk emails are emitting carbon dioxide.³

According to Mike Berners-Lee, carbon emissions academic and writer, the amount of CO2 emitted varies by email type.

A small, text-only email will emit around 0.3g of CO2. A flashy marketing newsletter with attachments? That burns up to 50g per email!³

How much email waste is there?

In 2024, it’s projected that 361 billion emails will be sent every single day.⁴ And over 50% of all emails can be classified as junk mail.²

As half of these emails are junk, it means 65.8 trillion junk emails will be sent to us over the next year!

How big is our junk email problem?

If we assume that all these junk emails are emitting the least amount of carbon possible (0.3g), they will still emit 19,764,750 million tonnes of CO2 next year.³

To understand what that means, check out these comparisons from the EPA 👇

Next year, junk emails will emit the same amount of carbon as:

If we got rid of 100% of email waste, it would be the equivalent of:

Let’s get rid of email waste – together:

We all hate spam – it’s annoying, clutters our inbox, and pollutes our planet.

But it’s not easy to stop. It takes forever to unsubscribe from every list and delete all our old emails off of these servers. So, what can we do?

Introducing Wildhero – your waste-free email:

With Wildhero, you can clean up your inbox and our planet. And it’s completely free!

Here’s how it works:

First, you download the app and connect it to your Gmail account. Then, you can read, write, and send your emails with the Wildhero app!

Next, we’ll find all the email waste in your inbox and show you its carbon emissions.

Then, you can swipe away the spam, while keeping the good stuff.

By deleting the email waste in your inbox, you’ll free up space on Google’s servers. This means electricity will be used to store more useful data, and you’ll get back storage space!

Why Gmail?

Gmail is the biggest email provider in the world. Over 1.8 billion people use it every day, and if your inbox looks anything like ours, we know a lot of junk emails get sent there.

We will be adding other email providers soon, but by targeting Gmail, we can have the biggest impact as quickly as possible.

Plus, Wildhero plants trees too!

In Wildhero, we show subtle, anonymous advertisements for eco-friendly companies. We use 80% of this ad revenue to fund tree-planting projects.

That’s right: with Wildhero Mail, you aren’t just stopping email waste, but also reforesting our planet! Read more about our tree-planting here.

Will Cutting Email Waste Save Our Planet?

Realistically, no one thing will solve climate change. Instead, we’ll need to change everything in our society to be more energy efficient and less wasteful.

While the emissions from junk emails are relatively small compared to other polluters, it’s an easy first step towards a better planet. By getting rid of the waste in our inboxes, we’re taking a small step towards a cleaner, greener, and more energy efficient world for all.

Footnotes:

1. Estimate done by multiplying the average emissions per email by the daily projected junk emails sent in 2024. Convert result to metric tonnes, multiplied by 365 days, then use EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator to calculate total cars driven.
2. Google states their servers are carbon neutral, which is achieved through carbon offsets purchases. While offsets make this claim valid, it doesn’t change that the servers themselves are still emitting GHG.
3. Berners-Lee, M. (2021). How Bad are Bananas? The carbon footprint of everything. Greystone Books.
4. Ceci, L. (2023, August 22). Emails sent per day 2025. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/456500/daily-number-of-e-mails-worldwide/
5. Estimate done by multiplying the average emissions per email (see footnote 3) by the daily projected junk emails sent in 2024 (see footnote 4). Convert result to metric tonnes, multiplied by 365 days
6. See these numbers yourself. Go to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator,  input “19,764,750” into carbon dioxide (metric tonnes of Co2 from junk email), then examine carbon equivalencies!