Our worst water-wasting habit might not even feel slightly damp: we’re now being told to save water by clearing out our inboxes. “Deleting emails, unbelievably, makes a difference to the amount of water the country uses,” Helen Wakeham, the Environment Agency director of water, told the World at One last week. Hoarding decades’ worth of “Your Amazon order is out for delivery” notifications in datacentres consumes not just energy but water for cooling, and tech companies are building those datacentres in some of the most water-scarce places in the world.
Wakeham called an email cull “something really tangible people might not think of that can make a difference”, and I do want to make a difference. I don’t use water-gobbling ChatGPT, I comply with the hosepipe ban (albeit swearing at Yorkshire Water as I slop washing-up water into my shoes transporting it to my dying plants) and my showers are so short they’re basically pointless. So I checked my inbox: 39,674 emails dating back to 2009. Ugh.
And what emails! I sampled a random month in 2017 and it was mostly ads (for everything from Pokémon cards to a Thai cafe where I once used the wifi), plus low battery alerts for my long-defunct FitBit, updates on a rat I sponsored (also, surely, long-defunct), PTA round robins and a rudely rejected pitch. Why did I keep them? Why do any of us? Inertia, and overwhelm; irrational anxiety we might need some of it “someday”; a misplaced belief there’s gold in them thar folders (a gif of a leopard trying Marmite I once sent myself admittedly sounded golden, but the link was dead).
Maybe – and I’m mostly trying to convince myself here – we could cast off this thirsty digital comfort blanket. Will HMRC ever demand proof I went to Peterborough in 2011? Could I find that cookie recipe another way (say, ooh, by Googling it)? Is a forensically detailed discussion of Gap boyfriend chinos really vital material for my memoirs? Join me, and let’s free ourselves of decades of digital dross. We have nothing to lose but a complete record of every pizza we ordered 2012-2025.
• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
