Education on the cost of e-mails

This paper evaluates the economic and environmental costs of sending an e-mail from home. Because e-mail is an indispensable tool for almost everyone today, its price is compared with the price of a stamp for snail mail. However, the price of sending an e-mail is hidden within telecommunication infrastructures. Although e-mail has a real economic and environmental cost, the absence of this real cost leads us to overproduce e-mails. Despite the fact that we pay flat rates, there are time windows that pollute less. In some cases, the cost of the infrastructure is lower than the cost of its exploitation, and ADSL is the least cost-effective according to the prices in Spain. A final reflection is that a single e-mail is very cheap but thousands of apparently free e-mails are expensive. If our students, the most intensive e-mail users, learn about its environmental costs, they may be persuaded to adopt Sustainable Development Education.