Image by Fräulein Schiller via Flickr
Sending an e-mail instead of taking a printout of a document is considered an environment friendly option. Well, you may feel that you have helped save your planet by saving a few sheets of paper. Ever thought of impact of Internet on environment?
The document that you send a shall be stored in the servers of your mail service providers. Most individuals prefer retaining bulk of their documents in the mail accounts for years at a stretch. This means that the mail service providers will be forced to store this data for long durations.
Servers consume electricity. This electricity comes from thermal electricity plants. These plants make use of coal. Coal is burnt and the smoke is dumped into the atmosphere. You might have saved one or two trees by avoiding paper but you may contribute to the pollution in a significant manner by sending the mail.
Once we start analyzing the internet from this perspective, we realize that the huge volume of spam and other useful information that is on the internet may well be pushing our planet into jeopardy. Of course, the planet will survive but it is our race that is going to face problems if we destroy our ecosystem.
These issues will have to be analyzed and sorted out before one can confidently state that internet is good for the planet and the environment. Sadly, there seems to be no authority or body working towards this end. All of us are busy praising the World Wide Web for improving our lives without realizing that it is a part of the environmental problem that the world is facing.
