Pumping water for your computer
Researchers at Imperial College London claimed in a report last year that up to 200L of water could be consumed per gigabyte of data downloaded. They also said the figure could be as low as 1L of water per gigabyte, so there's plenty of speculation involved - the true figure is probably somewhere between the two. The fact is that IT consumes a huge amount of water. US Data Centres alone consumed 626 billion litres of water in 2014, and this figure is expected to rise to 660