Orange is calling on its employees and the general public to delete their excess e-mails with the “E-cleaning days” campaign

Paris, Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Orange is firmly committed to reducing its CO2 emissions, particularly those linked to the operation of its data centers, and it also wanted to use the occasion of the COP21 to share an informative message promoting responsible ICT usage(1 ).

As a mailbox host and internal messaging system user, Orange is involved in efforts to reduce the impact of e-mail on the environment. To this end, alongside its agency Publicis Conseil, the Orange Group came up with E-cleaning days, an awareness campaign aimed at informing employees and the general public about responsible mailbox usage, encouraging them to regularly delete excess e-mails that are too large and too old in order to limit energy consumption on servers: a simple gesture along the lines of selective sorting, applied to digital. [

A viral campaign to evaluate the positive impact of our efforts

The campaign has already been launched internally, with all employees from the 29 Group countries encouraged to sort their company mailbox as of November 18, 2015. The campaign will then expand to the general public using advertising and media, taking advantage of the opening of the COP21, which runs from November 30 to December 11, 2015. During this period, Orange will launch a crowdspeaking campaign on the Day Cause platform (http://daycause.org/crowdspeaking/), where anybody can join the E-cleaning days cause by committing to deleting 50 excess e-mails. Consulting firm Carbone 4 worked with Orange on establishing equivalences on energy savings. For example, if every person in France deleted 50 old e-mails, this would equate to switching off 1.6 billion low energy light bulbs for one hour, turning off the Eiffel Tower lights for 24 hours, or even half a day of zero electricity consumption across Paris.

Join theE-cleaning days cause

View the awareness video

(1 ) Information and Communication Technologies (2 ) Crowdspeaking: a platform for mobilizing support for a cause or a project (via social media) (3 ) Calculations and equivalences provided by Carbone 4, a consulting firm specialized in carbon strategy