The new Electrolux vacuum will clean your inbox

According to Electrolux, an average e-mail in an inbox equals 4 grams of carbon dioxide during its lifetime, and storing and computing data creates more carbon dioxide emissions than the aviation industry. Curbing that waste fits in with the company’s stated goal of reducing their own carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2020.

“At Electrolux, we are always striving for innovation that makes everyday life easier – in this case, we wish to encourage people to clean their digital dust,” Henrik Freudenthal, PR and social media manager EMEA at Electrolux Small Appliances, told Digiday. “When we were developing our new UltraFlex vacuum cleaner, designed to reach everywhere at home, we thought, ‘What if we could stretch that idea to reach through people’s screens?'”

The digital vacuum cleaner is based on an algorithm that identifies the so-called digital dust in user’s Gmail inboxes including spam, social notifications, promotions and old, unwanted emails, and then lets them choose how much of it they want to get rid of. They can also decide if they want the clutter deleted immediately or moved to the trash folder and receive a customized calculation of their own personal emission savings, based on the deleted data.

There are three different levels of how heavily the inboxes can be cleaned– S, M or L. The S level targets unread social and promotional e-mails. The M level targets social, promotional and unread e-mails up to the past three years except from those sent from the user’s own account or personal contacts. An algorithm scans through the user’s spam, trash and inbox, filtering out emails with negative words such as “offer” or “discount” while saving those containing positive words such as “receipt” or “password.” The L level targets the same e-mails as the M level, plus all e-mails older than three years.

Ajax had introduced a similar project helping people get rid of  social media clutter called Social Wipes earlier this year, allowing Facebook and Twitter users to log in to their accounts and unsubscribe from problematic feeds en masse.

The campaign is focused on global earned media to support traffic to the worldwidevac.com and will also be supported by all of Electrolux’s social channels, including YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

“I hope people will see the digital extension of the UltraFlex as an innovative ambition from Electrolux, not only to clean their homes, but also to help them keep their second home nice and tidy,” Freudenthal said. “We will measure success through numbers of kg cleaned, personally I hope for 10 tons and above.”