Environment Agency Recommends Deleting OLD Emails to Save Water
More hosepipe bans are now starting to come into force to help tackle water shortages during the increasingly dry summer months. Partly as the response to that, the UK Government’s Environment Agency (EA) has recently begun recommending that people help to save water by “deleting old emails to reduce pressure on data centre servers“.
The latest water saving tip of wonder comes alongside a list of all the usual suspects, such as a recommendation for people to take shorter showers, turning off taps when brushing teeth, using full loads for washing machines and dishwashers, and of course collecting rainwater for garden use. So to find the suggestion of deleting old emails alongside those somewhat logical tips does seem a little.. odd.
The idea behind this is that data centres can apparently consume significant amounts of water, primarily for cooling servers and associated infrastructure. Some studies have shown that a typical data centre can use hundreds of thousands, even millions, of gallons of water per day (here and here). But it should be said that a lot of those studies come from the USA and involved a baseline of data centres in areas with arid, or semi-arid, climates.
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The reality for a country like the UK, where the climate is much more variable – often colder rather than hotter – tends to be more complex. Quite a few of those past studies have also failed to take into account modern energy efficiency improvements and the rising use of closed loop systems, where water gets recycled multiple times before being replaced. Some water will then be lost to evaporation, while the rest is relatively clean and returned to the environment through various means.
Environment Agency Statement
Data centres are fundamental to growth, industry and society. Data centres store information ranging from medical records to photos on your phone. They also support many online services, from Artificial Intelligence (AI) to managing email and messaging. Data centres can require a large amount of water for cooling processes and there is the potential for a new large demand as more data centres are built.
Water availability needs to be considered when data centres are being planned, and consideration given to the water requirements of the cooling technology selected as well as where the data centre is being located. Data centres should look to other supplies of water beyond using Public Water Supply, for example using recycled water.
We want to continue to work with stakeholders to see how water resources planning for data centres can be improved. We are currently working with key representative bodies to collect data from the sector to increase our understanding of their current and future water needs. Such data is vital for long term planning and further collaboration is needed.
Naturally, email processing and storage does thus end up contributing to water usage in data centres, particularly since many of us do use online storage / cloud-based solutions for such services (Hotmail, Gmail etc.). Due to this, the government is clearly trying to connect the dots and raise awareness around the subtle impacts of that large inbox of stored email history that keeps growing year-on-year, and which many people rarely delete.
However, it’s worth remembering that some people do store emails locally too, and there’s clearly quite a big debate to be had around how much of an impact failing to delete old emails is actually having on the specific problem of water usage. We’d argue the impact may be exaggerated and then there’s the irony of how actually deleting your emails, while reducing storage, also increases processing and thus the heat that must be removed.
The fact of the matter may be that, if we’re going to talk about the load on data centres, then perhaps it would be better to start by reducing the collective use of processor intensive consumer AI solutions (or making it more efficient) and not to mention the many Internet Messaging platforms that also retain long cloud-stored records of your chat history etc.
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Put another way, we can think of various other – perhaps more impactful – ways of cutting water usage in data centres than scaring people into deleting that ancient email from [INSERT ANY COMPANY NAME HERE]. In fact, a better approach, rather than simple deletion, may be to have a run through of your inbox to ensure that your SPAM filter is preventing unwanted emails from continuing to reach your account in the first place (where possible).
The reality is that deleting a bunch of old emails probably isn’t going to stop a drought, and we think the overall impact level remains highly debatable, although it certainly would have some collective impact. But the free email providers will of course be happy with any suggestion that users should clean up their inbox.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
Do remember, someone was paid with public money to come up and write this PR.
Surely by deleting the email you slightly increase the energy usage as what was previously untouched data has to be located and removed.
Of course the effect either way is so tiny it’s totally swamped by the server next door running AI workloads..
If your provider has a “cold storage” tier, it can be even worse than that; your e-mail could be stored in a way that consumes no power or water at all (in a tape library, or on powered off disks). By accessing it with a view to deciding whether to delete it or not, you force the provider to consume power getting the e-mail into accessible state.
In this case, deleting the e-mail consumes resources that leaving it alone would not.
My first thought was, “Is this April 1st”…
Data centres also control humidity levels. So, depending on what type of system they use, this could also add to water consumption. Although in the UK you’d think they’d normally be removing atmospheric water than adding to it.
Of course there’s a water shortage, investment in additional supplies has not kept up with population growth. The EA should stop gaslighting.
I work for the NHS, it generates an enourmous amount of data especially within emails. So why can not these people accept that older emails are essential to solve problems??
How exactly is it solving problems? are you saying that clinicians or anyone are looking at 10 year old emails? if yes why?
Gmail, Hotmail etc will keep emails anyway even if you delete them. It’s data about you they’re after, not providing a service for you to access email, that’s a by-product.
The fact and timing of your deletion will be recorded and potentially correlated with other data (your browsing history, purchases etc) to infer new data.
Not signing up to or opting out of getting a zillion irrelevant emails, that might save something, primarily your sanity.
It’s an April Fool, 4 sure.
I recommend the water supplies to fix the leaks in their pipe networks.
In the meanwhile, I delete some e-mails and we can compare which had bigger impact.
But if they are so worried about e-mails, they shouldn’t have sent me the same e-mail twice already recommending shorter showers, etc.
Clutching at straws for the pathetic way government and it’s watchdog has totally failed the UK public with water supplies and allow them to run rampant, we now have regular dumping of raw sewage all allowed, an extremely dangerous lack of reserviours again all above board, vast profits being generated for the usual foreign owners of the water companies and their share holders. Oh and water treatment plants so old and inefficient they can’t cipher out drugs like cocaine and the contraception pill from the supplies.
And the solution is for the water companies to tell us all to delete our old emails.. living up to the pathetic reputation they deservedly have.
They can first word has 4 letters second one if off.
Let me guess, they used AI to generate this brilliant advice. It obviously does not use data centre.
Based on how clueless this, I suspect the government’s view is AI probably means ‘Actual Indians’.
If they wanted to give advice then maybe putting your phone down and not using so not consuming any CPU power running AI or processing web pages would help reduce energy consumption primarily. But I don’t think the water usage would change a jot. Maybe the pumps might run a little slower. But no water would actually be saved as it’s more than likely to be a closed loop system.
Too little water or too many people?
A case of an unsupervised summer intern.
This sort of thing has been suggested in France (“digital sobriety”) and thoroughly debunked. Someone even came up with the idea of forcing companies to add a header to their emails indicating what date it could be deleted after.
The energy used by your laptop and trawling through emails to delete far exceeds any savings from deleting some old emails.
I’m less worried about the water shortage reading this, I’m more worried about the oxygen theft that occurred when UK Gov thought up this “advice”.
Google is holding about 30,000 emails for me, they are all available online not sitting in offline storage as someone has suggested. They take up about 1/3 of my Google storage quota. I probably need to keep about 1,000 of those emails and I need to write a good filter or script to select the ones to keep. I should systematically delete emails every six months. The last time I purged my emails was about 10 years ago.
Google makes a good job at identifying spam emails and deleting them every month, I don’t need to do anything.
I also keep a lot of photos online and again they need purging.
Mark’s comments are too dismissive.
What no closed loop cooling just waste with no recovery.
Can’t be helped by all the hot air, O2 conversion to CO2 in this study, shame they don’t put the effort into managing the problems rather than spouting symptoms.
Its about time that all things net, from user devices, routing, transmissions to and from data locations etc. was costed for environmental waste, how much pollution is genereated by social media ‘look heres my picture/ polished nails/ latest botox/ haircut /stupid drving (that could be policed though)’ tat across the www etc. As opposed to useful data storage and access, after all it is a resource and should be cared for as such.
Isn’t it amazing that as one of the wettest countries our water (miss) management is so great, that we end up with restrictions after abit of warm weather. how on earth do all those warm holiday destinations cope with water with their huge influx of holiday makers in their hotter and drier climates!
Aonther Of*** and government failure of critical infrastructure.
The Environment Agency is not stating the obvious that water privatisation is the reason the UK has water restrictions and expensive water bills.
The proposals by the former deputy governor of the Bank of England will include the abolition of Ofwat and compulsory smart meters for water paid by higher water bills.
Water company shareholders have been paid over £85 billion in shareholder dividends from 1989 – 2025 with 90% of UK water companies in foreign ownership.
The government meanwhile supports cutting farmland for food self sufficiency to reduce reliance on food imports with solar farms and supports massive AI and quantum computer powered data centres that will use vast amounts of water.
The campaign group We Own It has information on water privatisation, privatisation of utilities, NHS privatisation and privatisation of public services.