Interesting Facts

16th February 2005 - The Kyoto Protocol, initially adopted for use on 11 December 1997, came into force.

According to research by climate consultants ICF International and anti-virus firm McAfee, email spam uses more than 33bn kilowatt-hours of energy every year. (This is enough to power more than 2.4m homes, and amounts to emissions of more than 17 million tons of CO2. Not just that, but searching for legitimate e-mails and deleting spam uses 80% of the energy, so of the 131kg of CO2 created by the average business user 22% of it is related to spam. According to the same report spam filtering would reduce unwanted spam by 75%, the equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road. I've never heard of wanted spam.)

According to US physicist Alex Wissner-Gross, a typical Google search on a desktop computer produces about 7g CO2. (This means that two search requests on the internet produces "as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle". Google says that a a typical search produced only 0.2g of carbon dioxide. I want to know what a typical search is!)

Around two million tonnes of clothing ends up in landfill in the UK every year. (The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) says the clothing and textiles sector in the UK produces around 3.1m tonnes of carbon dioxide, 2m tonnes of waste and 70m tonnes of waste water per year. In 2007 the Environment Select Committee found that the proportion of textile waste at council tips in the UK had risen from 7 per cent to 30 per cent in five years. It's called throw away or disposable fashion, driven by companies like Primark, in fact it's called the Primark effect. There is hope though, people like Helen Storey who began the Wonderland project, and who along with Professor Tony Ryan has invented the Disappearing Dress, which disintegrates in the wash. My only worry is that it rains a lot in the UK.)

According to the Suddeutsche Zeitung, between 1990 and 2008 Germany reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 22.4%. (Unfortunately the German coal industry is exempt from requirements under the EU internal emission trading system. Claudia Kemfert, an energy professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin said, "For all its support for a clean environment and the Kyoto Protocol, the cabinet decision is very disappointing." Which is a bit of an understatement.)