A longtime digital content consultant argues that many organizations retain excessive amounts of low-value or obsolete data. While estimates of how much corporate data is redundant, obsolete, or unused vary widely—ranging from 30% to 80-90% depending on how you define "dark" data—the core point holds: a significant portion of stored data goes unused and creates unnecessary costs. Data centers do consume substantial energy, and that's a real concern as workloads grow. However, the connection between data hoarding and environmental waste is more nuanced than simply calling storage "junk"—the real issue is that organizations often lack clear retention and deletion policies, which means they buy more storage than necessary and accumulate data they don't need. What's worth noting: as AI training becomes more common, companies face pressure to keep even low-value data "just in case" it might be useful for training. That trend could make the retention problem worse, not better. The practical takeaway isn't that most data should be deleted wholesale, but that organizations need clearer policies about what data actually needs to be kept and for how long.