Fact: By printing a document to give to someone, rather then using the email’s forward button – you are saving valuable energy and atoms from going to waste and doing the environment a favor.
With today’s power hungry network equipment, valuable energy and world resources are going to waste to deliver your email to the person in the next room. A typical email will need to be routed via at least a dozen mail servers, and up to a few hundred routers. Each router and server will be using a few cents per minute worth of power. Often networking equipment adds in ‘fake’ delays to help prevent a global melt down of communication.
There is also the side effect of high speed connections and that is the leakage of atoms and xray ray’s. The atoms becoming misplaced will eventually led to having to replace several million kilometers of cable and the leakage of xray ray’s will cause issues for whales and bats because they use xray systems for navigation.