Delete Old Emails To Save Water? Despite UK News, It Probably Won't Help.

UK environmental officials advocated for people to
delete old emails to save water, as data centers'
use a lot of water. Technology experts 
questioned whether this would help much.

 I'm terrible at deleting old and unwanted emails. 

It's just such a tedious pain to do, as I keep getting deluged with junk. If you try to get off email lists, it just creates a larger tidal wave of this junk.  

Does that make me a person that wastes water?

I know you wouldn't think a full email box means I make droughts worse somehow, but apparently that's a thing. Or at least some people think so. 

Via The Verge, here's an excerpt form a press release from Helen Wakeham, UK Environmental Agency Director of Water: "Simple, everyday choices - such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails - also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife."

Your accumulated emails supposedly make drought worse because data centers use a lot of water to keep power servers cool, which is necessary to allow them to work properly.  According to The Verge,    a small data center can use more than 25 milliliters of water per year, if it uses old-school methods of allowing water to evaporate.

But there are a lot of reasons why the UK Environment Agency's worries about accumulated email might be misplaced, at least in terms of water usage. Tech companies are using new cooling methods to try and limit the amount of water they use.

That in itself might be a losing battle, since surging AI technology uses enormous amounts of water due to the big elaborate data centers AI and other technologies demand. 

But several other sources say deleting your emails, which might improve your efficiency a bit, might not help much at all with limiting water usage. 

 According to ZME Science:

"Most cloud data, especially your old photos and emails, lives on  high-density, low-power hard drives or archive tape. These use very little energy, and in some cases, almost none at all when idle. Secondly deletion isn't immediate. Files persist for weeks or months after deletion, usually (in a) system  similar to a "recycle bin." Only when data is overwritten, and only if it leads to hardware decommissioning is any energy (or water) actually saved."

Additionally, says ZME Science, 

"Perhaps most importantly, it's the 'flows' of data that use up the most resources, not the 'stocks.'  In other words, the real environmental cost of digital life comes not from what you keep, but what you do

Watching an episode of a Netflix show uses as much energy as storing 50 GB of photos for a year. Using AI tools, video conferencing, TikTok scrolling - these 'live' activities are far more resource-intensive."

So, if you want to be environmentally friendly, and save water in a drought, there are things you can to that are much more effective than deleting old junk emails from some clothing company you bought a scarf from umpteen years ago. 

Up here in Vermont, we're gotten into a burgeoning drought. It's not severe, at least not yet.  So, we're trying not to take long showers, making sure faucets are shut tight. When I can, I let what little rainfall we get accumulate in containers and use that water to soak down plants a little bit. 

I could spend my day deleting the zillions of old emails I have. But that's boring. So, I'll take my chances. I don't think those old emails will drain Lake Champlain 

 

 

 

UK water managers also don't appear to know how much water deleting emails would save,

"The Environment Agency didn't immediately respond to an inquiry from The Verge about how much water it thought deleting files might save, nor how much water data centers that store files or train AI use in the UK's drought-affected areas."