Last summer, in the middle of a severe drought, the British government made an unusual request: could citizens please take a few minutes to delete their unwanted photos, outdated screenshots, and unopened junk emails? The goal wasn’t digital organization. It was water conservation.
The request confused people. What could emails possibly have to do with water shortages? The answer reveals something most of us never consider: “the cloud” isn’t some ethereal, consequence-free storage space floating in the digital ether. It’s housed on physical servers in massive data centers that consume staggering amounts of electricity and water to keep cool. And your 47,000 unread promotional emails are contributing to the problem.
Data Centers Use More Water Than Small Towns
A medium-sized data center consumes roughly 110 million gallons of water annually for cooling purposes — equivalent to the water usage of approximately 1,000 households. Larger facilities can drink up to 5 million gallons per day, matching the consumption of a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people.
The United States alone houses 5,426 data centers that collectively consumed 163.7 billion gallons of water in 2021. Texas data centers are projected to use 399 billion gallons by 2030 — enough to draw down Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the US, by more than 16 feet in a single year.
Most of that water doesn’t get recycled. Data centers rely heavily on evaporative cooling, which pushes hot air through water-soaked pads. The water evaporates to cool the air, which cools the servers. Once evaporated, it’s gone. In Newton County, Georgia, a single Meta data center uses 500,000 gallons of water daily — 10 percent of the entire county’s water consumption.
Your Blurry Screenshots Are Stored Forever on Someone’s Server
Here’s what makes digital hoarding an environmental issue: storing 100 gigabytes of data in the cloud (about 30,000 photos) generates roughly the same carbon footprint as driving 100 miles in a gas-powered car. The amount of energy required to store 1 terabyte of data on the cloud ranges from 40 kWh to 300 kWh annually.
Cloud providers maintain massive redundancy to ensure you can access whatever you want, whenever you want it. That blurry photo from 2014 you forgot existed? It’s stored on multiple servers across multiple data centers, all running 24/7, all requiring cooling. Multiply that by billions of users saving everything indefinitely, and the resource demand becomes enormous.
Every sent message, recorded video, and voice note has an energy impact. Technology use relies on transferring data from our devices to servers in data centers, which require electricity and water. Those servers use air conditioning and water to stay cool, and they never stop running.
50% of Americans Admit to Digital Hoarding
Research on digital hoarding behavior reveals five main psychological barriers to deleting digital data: keeping it for the future “just in case,” keeping it as evidence, finding deletion too time-consuming, emotional attachment to the data, and a “not my server, not my problem” mentality.
Approximately 50 percent of Americans admit to hoarding their digital files. Millions have inboxes with more than 1,000 unread emails. Sixty percent never delete pictures or videos from their digital devices. Among younger individuals, the rate of pathological digital hoarding reaches 21.5 percent.
The psychology resembles physical hoarding: fear of losing potentially valuable information, emotional attachment to memories, decision paralysis from overwhelming volume, and anxiety about making the wrong choice. Unlike physical clutter, digital accumulation feels consequence-free because it doesn’t visibly take over your living space. But the environmental impact is real and measurable.
Deleting Takes Five Minutes and Costs Nothing
The good news? This is one of the easiest climate actions anyone can take. No money required, no lifestyle changes, no complicated trade-offs between convenience and sustainability.
Dedicating five minutes during your commute to delete old photos, spending your Monday morning clearing out promotional emails you never open, or scheduling one hour per month for digital decluttering can make a tangible difference. When aggregated across millions of users, the reduction in energy and water consumption becomes significant.
Buy fewer physical devices and make them last longer — manufacturing accounts for more carbon impact than the energy your device uses throughout its lifetime. When possible, buy secondhand. And when you’re finally replacing that phone or laptop, look for e-waste collection drives in your area rather than sending devices to landfills.
The digital world accounts for approximately 3 percent of global greenhouse emissions, more than the entire global aviation industry. Data center water consumption is projected to increase by 170 percent between 2023 and 2030. The culture of archiving instead of deleting made sense when storage felt infinite and consequences invisible. Now we know better.