Andrew@generalising@mastodon.flooey.org
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.
Andrew@generalising@mastodon.flooey.org
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.