The Environmental Cost of E-mail Spam

The infamous spam E-mail.  Those who are less technologically-savvy are often fooled by it, and those of us who can recognize a spam E-mail from a mile away are just annoyed by it.  Either way, it's clogging up all of our "Junk Mail" folders, and none of us like it.

But did you know that those trash E-mails also have a negative impact on our environment?  Web Page FX Weekly put together a comprehensive infographic explaining the environmental price of spam.  Click on the image to enlarge: 

To summarize, the amount of greenhouse gas that's associated with one spam E-mail is equivalent to the amount of harmful gas that enters the atmosphere after a vehicle has driven three feet.  Ninety-five trillion spam E-mails are sent a year.  That means each year spam E-mails emit the same amount of greenhouse gasses as would a car would that's driven around the globe two million times.

Is there a way to battle spam E-mails?  After all, they've been an annoyance for almost 20 years.  Web Page FX Weekly suggests adding a spam filter to your E-mail account, reporting spam E-mails to spam@uce.gov, and helping spread awareness about this little-known issue.