Sustainable IT: Industry Must Devote Its Energies To Reducing E-Waste

News Article -- October 12, 2011

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In recent years, energy savings have been the overwhelming focus of the Green IT community – this needs to be rebalanced to give the e-waste problem the attention it deserves.

For IT, true sustainability will only be achieved when companies adopt a full lifecycle approach to managing their environmental impact, according to the Leading Edge Forum’s latest research. But when we take this holistic perspective, we see that the IT industry’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness.

The flip side of our industry’s relentless technological progress is rapid product obsolescence and ever-rising piles of electronic waste (e-waste). Put simply, Moore’s Law, the driving dynamic behind IT innovation for nearly five decades, is fundamentally not green, and perhaps not even sustainable – at least, not yet.

IT needs to focus on safe production and disposal of devices.

We have been making this point since our first Position Paper Green IT – Moving Beyond the 2% Solution back in early 2008. But the results of our latest sustainability research project have reconfirmed that, while the IT industry appears on track to be energy-neutral in terms of its net energy consumption and savings, there is still no credible scenario for safely managing the global production and disposal of literally billions of personal computers, mobile phones and other electronic devices.

Taking a holistic view

Yet in recent years, energy savings have been the overwhelming focus of the Green IT community – this needs to be rebalanced to give the e-waste problem the attention it deserves.

Our sustainability research has always stressed the need to take an integrated environmental approach that accounts for the production, consumption, application and disposal of IT products. Back in 2008, we learned from the available literature that all of the world’s datacentres, PCs and networks accounted for just 2% of total world energy consumption (and just 1.3% of greenhouse gas emissions). Based on a variety of sources, we also estimated that manufacturing and distributing these same hi-tech products (while much less discussed) required a roughly equivalent 2% of the world’s energy share.

Therefore, from a holistic energy perspective, if the application of IT could save just 5% of the remaining 96% of world energy usage, it could offset its own current consumption and production requirements, since (.05 x .96) > (.02 + .02). Many would argue that these savings have already occurred. But, as the energy used in producing and consuming IT continues to grow considerably faster than energy usage in the wider economy, we think that within five years, a 10% saving may well be needed to maintain this type of energy-neutral position ⁽¹⁾.

⁽¹⁾ To get a sense of the many complexities involved in these sorts of calculations, see Lorenz Erdmann and Lorenz M. Hilty, Scenario Analysis: Exploring the Macroeconomic Impacts of Information and Communication Technologies on Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Journal of Industrial Ecology, Volume 14 Issue 5 p. 826-843, October 2010.

Special Issue

To better understand the energy-saving benefits of IT and the means and likelihood of achieving these savings targets, in 2009 we commissioned and sponsored a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Industrial Ecology to look specifically at Environmental Applications of Information & Communications Technology (EAICT).

We are grateful to the EAICT project editors, Éric Masanet from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and H. Scott Matthews from Carnegie Mellon University, for assembling a world-class set of important peer-reviewed articles, focused on three main areas of potential IT-enabled energy savings:

Optimisation – the use of embedded IT to make products, machines, buildings, water systems and other activities smarter and more energy-efficient.
Behaviour – the use of IT to facilitate awareness, sharing, recycling, re-use, measurement, control, and the modelling of complex behavioural dynamics.
Dematerialisation – saving energy by using IT to replace physical goods and activities (such as stores, offices, travel and music delivery) with more efficient digital alternatives.

We strongly encourage those interested in environmental issues to read through these extremely well-done journal papers, which contain a vast amount of data, insight and supporting documentation. Read my full commentary for a summary of some of the key themes of the EAICT project.