Open up your email and what do you find? Spam! Spam! Spam! Worldwide 62 trillion spam emails are sent annually. With 80 percent of all emails being spam, these Server passed aggravating messages_TM
cost our patience, our pockets, and our environment.

Globally, spam consumes over 4 Gigawatts of electricity each year. That’s the same amount of electricity generated by 4 coal burning power plants. According to the software company McAfee, spam email is responsible for over 18 million metric tons of CO2 released annually. Get rid of spam for one year and we could save the amount of electricity used to power 2.4 million U.S. homes and the CO2 emissions equivalent to 3.1 million passenger cars using 2 billion gallons of gasoline.¹

Because countries with greater Internet connectivity tend to have more mail users, it’s these nations where you’ll find the most spam. The USA holds the #1 position for spam generation and uses 20% of all energy wasted on spam worldwide. With China at 19% and India at 19%, these fast developing, Internet growing nations will soon surpass the USA for the amount of energy demanded by spam. And, with per capita PC penetration in emerging markets to double by 2013, 1 out of every 3 people on the planet will have a PC. Where there’s PC’s, Internet connectivity follows. Where there’s Internet connectivity, there’s spam!

While it is relatively inexpensive for a spammer to create messages and get the spam chains rolling, costly down link handling of spam hits the public, businesses, and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) with fraud, lost productivity, and the need for increased data capacity infrastructure.

When it comes to pure energy drainage, viewing and deleting unwanted emails represent 52% of the energy wasted on spam. While spam filters and blockers have helped to curb the need to validate or invalidate every incoming email message (MSN blocks 2.4 billion spam messages daily)², spam filters also take a toll on energy use. When it comes to Spam, there is no free lunch!

So, how can we best rid ourselves of these unwanted bulk mailings? We must attack at the source. While spam filtering does help (annually, it reduces spam’s carbon footprint by the equivalent of taking 13 million cars off the road), it takes tremendous ingenuity and continual improvement to handle the filter evading tactics of spammers and the ever increasing digital traffic. ISPs, often stuck with the costly handling of spam traffic, are fighting back. In 2008, one U.S. prolific spammer, McColo, Inc., was taken offline by its upstream ISP. Overnight, spam volume dropped 70% globally! Good news for our in-boxes!

By decreasing unwanted email through shut down of major spam generators, we will reduce the number of new servers which need to be brought on-line to handle the traffic. With increased use of spam filters, we can decrease green house gas emissions while increasing work productivity. (It is estimated that 104 billion user hours per year are dedicated to reading and manually deleting spam).

Additionally, by better power management of our PCs, we can reduce our energy consumption and green house gas emissions ever further. PC’s and monitors account for 39% of all the carbon emissions generated by the information and telecommunications industry. Making PCs more energy efficient should be a top priority. As PC users, what can we do to help? We can power down. ”If the world’s 1 billion PCs were powered down for just one night, it would save enough energy to light up New York City’s Empire State Building-inside and out-for more than 30 years”³.

So, how should we power down? Well, power down and shut down are not the same thing. If you are finished using your computer for the day and do not need it for remote access, turn it off when you leave your desk. If you need your computer for remote access, power it down by putting it in Sleep/Hibernate mode. This mode greatly reduces energy consumption and still allows remote access to the computer. Also, reduce energy consumption during the day by using your power scheme settings. You can shut down your main screen (the computer is still running behind the scenes) whenever there is inactivity for a specified time. A good rule of thumb is if the computer is inactive for 5 or 10 minutes, it should be set to automatically go into power save mode. You can resume your activity by simply clicking on any key. Watch out for those big, graphic screen savers, they can use a lot of energy. If we all manage our own computers wisely, we can help to reduce energy consumption and green house gas emissions. When all are individual efforts are added up, globally we will have major positive impact on the environment.

To learn more about energy conservation through spam reduction, check out these books:

Happy Monitoring!

© 2010 Recycle Life, LLC
The RecyGal^TM and the RecyGal character, logo and Server Passed Aggravating Messages^TMare trademarks of Recycle Life , LLC

References for this article were obtained from:¹“The Carbon Footprint of Email Spam Report”, McAfee® White Paper, 2009, “Spam as a Percentage of Email”, M86 Security, www.m86security.com, Server passed aggravating messages™ is a trademark of Recycle Life, LLC, ²“Spam Statistics and Facts”, www.spamlaws.com, 2009, “Emission Facts; Greenhouse Gas Emissions for a Typical Passenger Vehicle”, www.epa.gov, February 4, 2005, ³ “The Power to Save Money”, PC Energy Report 2009, Alliance to Save Energy, 1E.

With about 180 million individual cards to be exchanged (excluding packaged children’s cards), this holiday is heavy on paper cardstock. Despite the tons of paper used for this holiday, Valentine’s Day represents only about 12.5% of the 7 billion U.S. greeting cards sold annually. With Hallmark and American Greetings controlling over 80% of the market, anything these companies do to make greeting cards more eco-friendly does have immediate “green impact”. Thankfully, both companies do offer cards with recycled content. With about 30% of all greeting cards containing some recycled content, over 1 million trees are saved annually. Marketing cards made from 100% recycled paper, American Greeting’s Recycled Paper Greetings www.recycledpapergreetings.com is the “green card” leader. Buy a greeting card with recycled content and you will not only be saying to your Valentine, “How do I love thee?” , you will be letting these corporate purveyors of messages hear, “Let me count the trees”.

Saving our trees by using recycled paper to produce greeting cards must be supported by recycling the cards that are gifted. Greeting cards can be recycled wherever “mixed paper” is accepted. Since most municipalities accept “mixed paper”, please remember to recycle all your cards that are not personal keepsakes. If your municipality or hauler does not accept “mixed paper”, you have until February 28th to send your Valentine’s Day cards to St. Jude’s Ranch for Children. For 34 years, St. Jude’s has accepted used greeting card fronts and works with children to trim the cards and glue them onto pre-printed card backs. These refurbished cards are then packaged and sold by the charity. According to their website, “The benefits are two-fold; customers receive “green” holiday cards for use and the children receive payment for their work and learn the benefits and importance of “going green”. It is St. Jude’s commitment to “break the vicious welfare cycle and to teach the children to learn to earn”, they pay each child fifteen cents for each card made. While the program does not specifically create cards purposed for Valentine’s Day, this 34 year old program will use “anything…that starts with a used greeting card front. For a small postage fee you will be supporting a charity that has helped millions of children. To learn more about this greeting card recycling program, please visit their website at: www.stjudesranch.org

A favorite among Valentine’s Day gifts is the heart-shaped box filled with chocolates. Chocolates presented in individual wrappings, placed inside a cardboard carton which is then wrapped in cellophane just seem to make for a beautiful presentation! Today, even our favorite candy bar brands are specially wrapped to bring in the holiday. And, a chocolate lover’s holiday it is. In 2009, 58 million pounds of chocolate sold for Valentine’s Day. Wrap, wrap, and wrap! Who’s counting? I don’t deny that wrapping serves not only as candy “fashion”, but also enables mechanized production and helps to maintain product freshness, but when is the wrapping too much? When the wrapping does not incorporate any recycled content and is itself not recyclable- that’s overwrapped chocolate! Since most candy wrappers are wax-coated or made of layered adhered materials (paper, foil, and plastic) they are not recyclable. Plastic-coated, color inked-paper laminates may grab our attention for a few seconds at retail, but ultimately these super packaged eye-catchers end up sitting in our landfills for hundreds of years. A quote from, A Century of Candy Bars, by David Grager, is definitely some food for thought, “The simple sheet of paper used to protect our favorite candy bar, an item we rarely think about or consciously notice, one that we immediately throw into the trash, may tell us more about ourselves than we realize”. Not so sweet a thought?! Help may be on the way. Some emerging technologies may one day make wrapper recycling a reality. Material reclamation technology being developed by Polyflow Corp www.plyflow.uuuq.com and plasma technology used for aseptic brick recycling may one day be used to recycle candy wrappers. (To read more about recycling aseptic packages visit: www.www.recygal.com/2010/01/19/tetra-pak%c2%ae-building-a-foundation-for-carton-recycling-with-aseptic-bricks/#more-1453).

Despite the current lack of wrapper recycling, there is no reason why candy cartons and elements of candy wrappers cannot be made with recycled content. The food grade recycled cartons and papers available to candy producers are not widely used. Surprisingly, even many organic chocolate manufacturers do not place emphasis on the eco-friendliness of their packaging. Shameful! Since packaging is fashion and the confectionery industry follows trends, the current greening of America should eventually gain momentum in the candy arena too. In the meantime, at least recycle your candy cartons. Every carton we keep out of a landfill helps to save trees. And, of course, you can always support companies like TerraCycle® who make wonderful items out of reclaimed materials like candy wrappers. Visit www.terracycle.net to learn more about their efforts and how you can participate.

The No.1 gift associated with Valentine’s Day is a bouquet of roses. This year, over 100 million roses will be sold for the holiday. With growing, packaging and shipping all taking tolls on the environment you may want to consider sending an organically grown bouquet. An online purveyor of organic flowers, Organic Bouquet, offers flowers grown to meet certified guidelines for sustainable crop production, ecosystem protection, fair labor practices, community benefits, and product quality. All orders are packaged using recycled and recyclable materials. To atone for the carbon footprint generated by shipping, the carbon emissions from each shipment are “offset by rolling funds into the Nicaragua Restoration Project”. Over a forty year period, this project will sequester more than 150,000 tons of carbon dioxide by reforesting over 850 acres of abandoned pastures with native trees. Check out www.organicbouquet.com for your floral needs.

As Valentine’s Day fast approaches and soon leaves us for another year, let’s try and keep all our holiday traditions as green and as renewable as possible. Please submit any suggestions you may have to keep our gifting greener; we can all learn from each other. Happy Valentine’s Day!

© 2010 Recycle Life, LLC
The RecyGal^TM and the RecyGal character, logo are trademarks of Recycle Life , LLC

References for this article were obtained from: www.recycledgreetingcards.com, “Environmental Info”, USAID, Expro El Salvador, Program for Export Promotion, for the Micro, Small, and Mid-Size Businesses, San Salvador 7, July 7, 2005, www.grinningplanet.com , “Congratulations!..On Overpaying for the Greeting Card”, February 8, 2005, www.emotioncards.com, “The History of Greeting Cards”, www.poemhunter.com, “How Do I Love Thee”, Elizabeth Barret Browning, www.slashfood.com , “Why we Give Candy on Valentine’s Day, H. Raskin, February 4, 2010, www.earth911.com, “Recycling Mysteries: Candy Wrappers”, B. Hammad, May 18, 2009, www.www.underconsideration.com, “A Century of Candy Bars- An Analysis of Wrapper Design”, David Crager, The Gazette, “Valentine’s roses bloom by the millions”, D. Wilson, February 11, 2000, PR Newswire, “Organic Roses on Valentines Say ‘ I love you and the earth too!’”, January 25, 2005, www.organicbouquet.com