Do you know Co2 gets released in the atmosphere when you send or keep emails in your email account? This process is pretty straightforward, you just need to build a process using uipath technologies to calculate the carbon footprint from a given email account.
Working: the process would expect 4 input parameters - email account, folder, start date, and end date. Based on these input parameters, the process would scan the user’s email folder and returns the total carbon emission for a given period.
Formula - for a simple email(without attachment) the co2 emission is 4 gm, for emails with attachment co2 emission is 50g and for spam, it is .3g. when you get the result also try to give an equivalent figure related to carbon emission.
e.g. if the carbon emission is 2 kg then you can say it is equal to carbon emission by a car between Bangalore to Chennai or any relevant information to spread the awareness
AS-IS WORKFLOW, TO-BE WORKFLOW
-
Other information about the use case
Industry categories for this use case: BFSI, Compliance, Customer Service, Finance, Healthcare Pharma, HR, Information Technology and Services, Legal, Manufacturing, Operations, Telecom
Skill level required: Intermediate
UiPath Products that were used: UiPath Studio, UiPath AI Center, UiPath Apps, UiPath Data Services
@Manoj_Batra Kudos to you and your team for building & sharing this use case, can you also share the references used to determine the emissions levels used in the formula.
@Manoj_Batra I saw these numbers in the video as well, what I meant that you must have found these numbers from some environmental study or research paper, if possible please share those resources. Thanks.
I think this use case is an interesting project in a hackathon. However, this should NOT be used as a policy making tool or used to support any hypothesis or measures.
The formula you suggest is not a formula, it was an estimate from the author is 2010 and updated in 2020 in the new version of the book.
Not all books can be categorised as a scientific source of information. An author has no obligation to get his/her book peer-reviewed before publishing and only some authors release books with errata (mostly academical books) if they discover some errors or inconsistency in their book.
What about other greenhouse gases? carbon monoxide (completely manmade), methane etc.
In my opinion, this use case should not be used in any policy making or cost estimations or in estimating UN sustainability targets within an organisation. It is not complete and taking measures based on incomplete information is not the way to handle such a controversial and debated topic.
Suggested improvements
I am sure you can find a better reference to base your calculations. If you want to dive deeper, I would suggest you talk to a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) analyst. This is the field where each man made material is studied for its emissions during its entire lifecycle from raw materials to recyling. Again, a good LCA analyst will be upfront and say there are assumptions in such calculations, but atleast the results can be checked for statistically significance and can be peer-reviewed.
Thanks, @jeevith for these great insights. I will explore the journals and look into the suggested improvements as well. However, this tool is more about spreading awareness and change individuals’ internet behavior to reduce carbon emissions.
Here, we are more focusing on removing the unnecessary emails and sending the email using the ‘right first-time’ approach. Here, unwanted or spam meaning is different from what we have in normal spam filters in our mailboxes as organizations have their own inbuilt AI for dealing with these types of emails. Here are some examples of spam for both corporate as well as individual accounts.
Meeting accepted or declined email which doesn’t have any value after a period of time
Digital transaction emails, Like OTP which remain valid for 10-15 mins(average) and loses their value after the expiration time.
Email from e-commerce sites about the tracking details and out of delivery status(some of the emails are not relevant)
A user subscribes to an RSS feed and doesn’t read the message which eventually increasing the mailbox size
Notifications from social networking sites can also come under this
A user can have one corporate account and can also have multiple accounts on sites like Gmail, Yahoo, etc. so this idea is not about creating a policy, it is about spreading awareness and provides information to an email user about how they can contribute to reducing the carbon emission from their email accounts. Also, companies are paying a lot of amount to the data centers to store the emails on their server which requires space as well as electricity.
considering the time we’d got to create this POC for hackathon, I believe my team has done great work on the project and we definitely want to take it further to incorporate all the suggestions and feedback we have or will receive from you in the future. In terms of formula calculation, we can change it anytime based on pieces of evidence
We have taken just one step towards environmental sustainability and I would want everybody to contribute and make the earth a greener place to live.
prashant1603765
ashokkarale
sharazkm32
Anon_Robot
Yoichi
Anil_G
bhanu.priya2
sonaliaggarwal47
xspunky
MD_Farhan1