If you’ve ever needed an excuse to delete all your emails and never look at them again, we have some good news for you.
The UK, famously grey and windy, is in the grip of its fourth heatwave this year.
Thermometers are expected to push up to 30°C and higher today, with five areas officially in drought and hosepipe bans in effect.
The water shortfall situation in England is now ‘a nationally significant incident’, the National Drought Group heard at a meeting yesterday.
Now, environmental officials are asking people to help save water by deleting old emails.
Helen Wakeham, the Environment Agency director of water, said: ‘The current situation is nationally significant, and we are calling on everyone to play their part and help reduce the pressure on our water environment.
‘Simple, everyday choices – such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails – also really help the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife.’
How would deleting my emails help save water?
On average, a person receives 121 emails every day, many of which simply gather dust as your account stores them in the cloud.
Online storage services are maintained by data centres, massive buildings filled with hard drives that guzzle up dizzying amounts of power.
And they need a serious amount of water to stay cool – larger centres in the can consume up to 5million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 people.
Yet as climate change, caused by our continued reliance on planet-warming fossil fuels, makes English water hotter and drier, officials and water chiefs aren’t sure where all this water will come from.
July was the fifth-warmest month on record, despite heavy storms offering a brief reprieve from the extreme heat.
Reservoirs, depleted by weeks of next to no rain, are 67.7% full on average across England, far below the 80.5% average for August. Some basins, such as the Derwent Valley group in Derbyshire, are less than half full.
One in two rivers is at a low level, leaving them cracked and dry and putting local wildlife in peril.
To help water firms endure the scorching heat, Yorkshire Water, Thames Water, South East Water and Southern Water have introduced hosepipe bans to limit how much water customers can use.
Dr Jess Neumann, associate professor of hydrology at the University of Reading, told Metro: ‘The success of a hosepipe ban relies on public compliance – if people are on-board, then hosepipe bans typically reduce water consumption by 3-8%.
‘They have the dual advantage of raising awareness of our need to be mindful of water use where we can. Small actions can lead to big water savings.’
So, by deleting emails, there are fewer things for these server farms to store, which will generate less heat.
Ways to save water
Not everyone is convinced that deleting emails will save a substantial amount of water, given that deleting emails involves processing power that also, well, generates heat.
Experts told Metro that there are many ways people can help save water beyond clearing out their email inbox.
Hosepipe bans, as their name implies, temporarily ban the use of hoses to water gardens and wash vehicles.
Alison Dilworth, a campaigner for the grassroots network Friends of the Earth, told Metro that every room in the house is an opportunity to do so:
In the bathroom:
- The obvious one: when brushing teeth, turn the tap off between rinses.
- Fix leaky taps – tiny drips easily turn into gallons (1 drip per second = over 12,000 litres a year)
- Try showering for one to three minutes instead of the average eight minutes taken in the UK.
- Fit low-flow shower heads – these use six litres of water a minute compared with the standard heads using about 10-15 litres a minute.
- Toilets use a quarter of the water in homes. Check if your toilet has a leak.
In the kitchen:
- Using a washing-up bowl can cut water use by half.
- Fill up washing machines to the recommended load.
In the garden:
- Get a water butt, or two, for free water from your roof and gutters to water the garden.
- Let the grass go brown – grass is very hardy/resilient and will bounce back.
- Water plants at the roots, not on the leaves, to ensure the water goes directly into the soil.
- Put trays under potted plants to catch any water from giving them a reservoir to draw on.
Dan Goss, a survivalist who runs the website Start Prepping UK, gave a few extra tips to Metro:
- Canned foods that contain water, like chopped tomatoes, are shelf-stable and long-lasting, and they also cut down on the amount of water you’ll need to add to your cooking when preparing a meal
- Mulch is a soil covering for plants, which can help nourish your plants and fertilise the soil, but it also crucially prevents the soil from losing water through evaporation.
While people are asked to turn off their faucets, Dilworth said that water suppliers also need to do their part.
More than 3billion litres of water were wasted every day in England and Wales between 2020 and 2023 due to leaky pipes, amounting to 1,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools a day.
When you turn the tap on, 19% of the treated water is lost to leaks before it even reaches your home, according to official figures.
Leaks happen as worn-out pipes expand and contract, an issue not helped by cold weather, tree roots or building works.
‘With climate change making droughts more frequent and severe, it’s clear the government and water companies must do much more to prevent shortages and protect nature,’ she said.
‘Water companies are wasting hundreds of millions of litres every day through leaks – that’s completely unacceptable.’
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