I got sucked into running the numbers on that "delete emails to save water" thing. Best estimates I can find are that live datacentre storage in the UK has a median water usage of ~80ml/GB/year. So a terabyte of cloud storage consumes 80 litres a year.

Network losses from leaks are on the order of 10-15,000 litres per person per year.

Glad we can see the culprit is definitely old forwarded cat photos.

If you cut your daily shower by half a second you'll save enough water for a few hundred GB of ongoing storage. Buying one less t-shirt a year saves 20 TB worth of water. Not having a garden sprinkler in the summer is pushing towards the water usage of a whole PB of drives.

There are things we do with lower water impact than "file emails", but it's hard to imagine what they are.

As I finish drinking the second half-litre bottle of water of the day, I realise I've swallowed about 12.5 GB of Mastodon images (that's how it all works, right?)