Save Water…Delete Old Emails
No joke: the UK Government’s Environment Agency and Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs has suggested deleting old emails to reduce water consumption.
If we assume these emails are stored in the cloud, and not on someone’s laptop (as was more often the case 10–15 years ago), then there might be something in this — but it’s tenuous, to say the least.
Yes, water is used to remove heat from data centres, but storing data does not, in and of itself, generate heat. Heat comes from computation, a deep property of the physical universe, though our current technology is still far from the theoretical limits where this becomes unavoidable.
Presumably, the thinking is that less data means fewer spinning hard disks or SSDs will be needed, and there will be less data to back up. So less heat. But this overlooks the minuscule amount of space an email actually takes up.
Processing email content creates heat (for example, to update search indexes or power AI tools) — but there’s a chance that deleting emails will cause these processes to run again anyway.
So I’m very confused by this. I’m pretty sure that having slighly less coffee in your mug would have a much greater impact than deleting some old emails.