Every old screenshot and bad selfie you hoard has a hidden carbon footprint.

There’s probably a photo on your phone right now that you haven’t looked at in years. Open your gallery, and you’ll find all kinds of things you forgot you saved. You might see recipes you swore you would cook, 50 blurry shots just to get one good picture for Instagram, duplicate documents or screenshots of a random QR you scanned once and never needed again.

You probably think none of it matters. It’s just sitting there, not doing anything, right?

Not quite. It is actually doing something quietly in the background to the environment. That forgotten photo or screenshot hasn’t disappeared. It’s sitting on a server somewhere, saved not just once, but a few times, on machines that never really turn off.

CNET’s parent company Ziff Davis employs some of the most tech-savvy journalists on the planet, and when surveyed, even they didn’t know what happens to their forgotten media. In a survey conducted across our sister sites and internally at CNET, nearly half of respondents — 47.9% — said they had never thought about how storing files uses real electricity or affects the environment.

Which makes sense. Nobody gets a monthly bill for their old emails or photos the way they do for electricity at home. So, it’s not that people don’t care. It’s just that no one ever told them there was something to care about in the first place.

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