Brevo's Carbon Footprint
Comparing carbon emissions of online media
When determining the carbon footprint of online media, file size is the most important factor to consider. Compared to other forms of digital marketing like webpages and video, email has the lowest emissions by far.
1Average Brevo email
22011 mobile webpage
31 min Facebook Live
42021 mobile webpage
530s HD YouTube video
The larger the content, the more processing is required to load and display it on a device. This translates to greater energy consumption both in the short term (powering a device) and long term (how quickly a device needs to be replaced).
Comparing carbon emissions of email to other communication channels
To put our footprint in perspective, let’s compare the carbon emissions of email to those of other communication channels, both online and offline:
Brevo campaign: 1,000,000 emails
175kg CO2eq
(0.175 gCO2eq per email)
Emissions to reach 1,000,000 persons with
30s TV spot in Europe
x 1.3
30s TV spot in the US
x 2
A 20g letter (Inner Paris)
x 95
A 20g letter (Across France)
x 143
Based on an audience of 1,000,000, a 30-second ad in the US has twice the level of carbon emissions than an email. And to reach the same number of people via mail, you’d release 143 times more carbon than with email.
Comparing carbon emissions of email and video
Video represents two-thirds of mobile traffic and is growing fast – while email is light and drives less than 1% of digital emissions.
Find out more
Because video files are so large compared to email, its carbon emissions are much higher.
Share of video in mobile traffic
Calculate your campaign’s carbon emissions
To make things easier for our customers who want to take on their own carbon footprint assessments, we’ve created this emissions simulator. Select your country of residence and the number of emails you would like to send to find out what your estimated carbon emissions would be:
Your emissions = 0 gCO2eq
This simulator takes into account the carbon equivalent emissions of Brevo clients preparing an email campaign on their desktop computer (lasting on average 3.5 minutes) as well as emissions related to the electricity and server manufacturing of our datacenter and telecom network. This simulator makes the following assumptions: open rate is 20%; read time is 12 seconds; 50% of emails are opened on mobile devices; 34% of emails are opened on desktop computers; 16% of emails are opened on other devices. Brevo's corporate carbon footprint is subject to slight variations on account of varying electricity consumption. As a result, individual emails may have slightly different emissions.
Reducing our environmental impact
Based on these findings, we’ve identified four ways we can reduce our environmental impact:
Educate our employees to make environmentally responsible decisions in their choice of service providers, commutes to work, their tech usage, etc.
Develop our CSR purchasing policy and create guidelines for selecting responsible service providers.
Develop features to reduce our platform’s carbon impact from within like sustainable email templates, an expiration date for emails, tips to reduce your campaigns’ emissions, etc.
Identify and support environmental initiatives that align with our values.
These are just the first steps in a longer journey to environmental sustainability, but we at Brevo are committed to playing our part. Businesses have a responsibility to assess and reduce their carbon emissions, and we’re proud to be part of a movement doing exactly that.
There’s more to come for Brevo's overall sustainability strategy, so stay tuned. In the meantime, feel free to contact our Customer Care team with questions about our carbon footprint assessment.