Internet has a Dirty Little Secret
Our addiction for digital technologies has a disastrous impact on the environment. We need to start talking about it.
This post is inspired by the Lean ICT report. A great piece of work by The Shift Project, a French Think Tank on carbon transition.
As UX designer, when looking at climate change, I thought I wasn’t part of the problem. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I totally underestimated the impact of digital technologies on the environment.
Smartphones, laptops, e-readers, video streaming, the cloud, etc. We are using them everyday and it became integral part of our life. It is hard to imagine a time before it. But, what is their environmental impact?
Internet isn’t dematerialised
Internet was supposed to lead us toward a dematerialised economy. We thought we would get rid of most of our paper consumption. However between 2000 and 2020, our consumption of paper stayed the same.
We’ve been brainwashed that using digital tools instead of paper was better for the environment. It is not because you can’t see something that it doesn’t exist.
Far from moving to paperless world, digital technologies created an infinity of new usage, needs and new “problem to be solved”, created by the rise of internet itself. Between our devices built out of rare metals and huge climatized servers and infrastructures to manage our never-ending appetite for data, the IT sector requires a tremendous amount of energy.
Our virtual behaviour has a very tangible consequences on our environment. The trick is that when you scroll facebook or watch a cat video, you can’t smell the coal burning. Our belief that internet is dematerialised and clean comes from the fact we delocalised pollution to the other side of the world. It is often unknown by users that the web is powered by a gigantic infrastructure of cable under the ocean.
Yummy yummy, energy!
“Serving 4 billion users, the internet is the biggest machine ever built. And it is voraciously hungry.” says James Christie, the founder of a remote conference called Sustainable UX. From production of your latest Iphone to watching Netlfix on your computer, the energy required to power our connected lifestyle has exploded.
For example, sending a 1 MO email requires as much electricity as a 60W light bulb turned on for 25min. Watching a 1 hour long movie on your smartphone is equivalent for this same light turned on for 250 hours.
It is not surprising that roughly 9% of all electricity produced is used by the digital technologies. What’s even more inconvenient, this number keeps increasing by 9% per year.
Not only this growth in unsustainable, but our electricity produced today is far from being clean. Nearly 80% of energy produced in the world comes from fossil fuel, which is emitting a lot of CO2.
Skyrocketing CO2 emissions
A tiny problem though, all countries agreed at the Paris agreement that we need to stop burning fossil fuels asap. The later we reduce our CO2 emissions, the less likely we will stay under the liveable barrier of +2°c.
You see where I am going. Since digital technologies consume so much energy and that most of our energy is produced by burning fossil energies, they are undeniably emitting a lot of CO2.
In fact, the digital sector is responsible for 4% of CO2 emissions. That is a very big number. To give you a reference point, civil air transport emit 2% of CO2 emissions. If internet was a country, it would be the 6th biggest polluter.
More problematic is the increase by 8% every year. By 2025, the digital share of C02 emission could double to reach 8% of CO2 emissions. We are doing the opposite of what we are supposed to do. To respect Paris agreement, CO2 emissions need to decrease by at least 5% per year.
Raw materials depletion
The servers, networks and consumer devices production requires an enormous amount of metals. In your smartphone, more than 40 different metals are used.
Some of these metals are called “rare metals”. Even though they are rare, they are indispensable. The problem is that their reserve are already depleting. In the decade to come, we will reach the production peak of Indium, Zinc, Gold, Gallium, Germanium, etc.
Using the low-hanging fruit concept, we started by extracting the more accessible part of the reserve. Today, we need to dig deeper, spend more energy to obtain less concentrated metals.
The access to those metals is also limited by the geopolitical context of countries:
Most of these rare metals are produced either in highly unstable countries (for example, 65% of the world’s production of cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo), or almost monopolistically by a superpower (90% of the production of rare earths is under the control of China, which consumes 60%.
— Lean ICT report
Recycling seems to be more challenging than we originally thought of. An important part of old devices is either is forgotten in a drawer or ends up in the landfill. For the lucky ones that end up in the right e-waste pile, it doesn’t necessarily get to an high tech recycling center. Countries illegally export ‘millions of tonnes’ of e-waste annually to African nations like Ghana. Why? Because it is cheaper to ship them to Africa than it is to recycle it in European Union nations. For the few one that hopefully end up in a recycling facility, the components made of rare metals are either too intertwined or the concentration rate are very low (around 1%), which make it difficult to reuse these metals.
The same metals are also used for the production of equipment needed for renewable energies (wind & solar). If the growth in need doesn’t slow down, that could lead us into a technological dead end.
Of course, these elements will never disappear per say, we will always be able to dig deeper and open up more mountains with new technologies and more energy. But do we want to go this way? The same way that dragged us into this uncomfortable situation?
2 main reasons
This unsustainable trend is due to number of reasons, but let’s try to take a closer look at the most important ones:
Main reason #1: Over consumption of devices
We use our smartphones more than ever. In fact, battery power has increased by 50%, but we still charge our phone as often. This is due to increased time spent on our devices, watching more videos and using apps that requires more power.
That’s a good example of the rebound effect. Often, technology allow us to gain in efficiency, for example larger battery power. But as consumer, we adapt our usage, and instead of keeping our phone on for 3 days without a charge, we use it more intensively for one day. The gain is actually outweighed by the new consumption habit. It is then taken for granted, and requires engineer to come up with even more efficiencies. This is the vicious circle of innovation.
However, the energy spent to charge our phones is not such a big deal compared to what it takes manufacturing them. Production of the smartphones sucks up 90% energy consumption versus 10% for its use. They are more and more complex, with richer set of features and as we have seen previously, it requires a wide range of rare metals.
The lifetime of a smartphone is relatively short, less than 2 years. This is mainly caused by obsolescence. Newer operating system are available to older devices only at the cost of degraded performance and/or a significant reduction in the useful capacity of the battery. We all remember the scandal when we learned that apple slowed down on purpose older Iphones with new operating systems. But well, it’s Apple so it’s okay, right?
This is also applicable to other devices. We are over-equipping our household with all sort of digital gadget: smart TV, bluetooth speakers, bracelet measuring physical activities, connected light bulb, etc. The production, as well as the use of these devices leads to great energy consumption.
Our devices are not designed to be recycled. The race for slim design and thiner devices pushes designer and engineers to make a trade off on recyclability compare to look. Ifixit created a scoring system for reparability of smartphones. Sadly, very few reaches more than 8. Only one phone has the note 10 for reparability, it is called the Fairphone. Designed with a removable battery and easily replaceable component that are available on their eshop. No need for chirurgical operations when changing the battery because it is glued to the chassis. This shows clearly that companies can make better decision while designing their product.
Main reason #2: Explosion of data traffic
The traffic on networks has been increasing extremely fast in the past years, more than 25% per year. The reason?
Obviously, more and more people get access to the internet, especially in countries in developments. In 2020, we are more than 4.5 billions people online. Not only the number of user increased, but the number of connected devices per individuals has exploded. Today, around 22 billions devices are connected to the internet, while some reports suggest we could get to 50 billion by 2030.
Browsing the web is consuming more and more data. The average web page is now around 3MB compared to 1MB in 2011. This is due to more HD images and videos.
It is no surprise that the explosion in data traffic is mainly due to our usage of video. We can now watch high quality content from about anywhere. When buying a new TV, the remote even has buttons for streaming video platforms. It became easier than ever to stream online video. On top of that, video is the preferred format on social media and website.
A deeper look at the increase in mobile data traffic reveals that video has the biggest impact.
— Cisco, Monetizing the Mobile Data Explosion
We happily exchanged our external hard disks for the comfort of the cloud. Our data is now available from anywhere, there is no risk of loosing them and this has been boosting collaborative work (especially during COV-VID epidemic). I realised that most of the time I spend on the computer are on app based on the “cloud”: Google Drive, Dropbox, Google Photo, Spotify, Youtube, Figma, etc. It’s not a surprise that 80% of the traffic is from the services provided by “GAFAM” 16. When your data is stored in the cloud, you need to make a request to server every time you need t access it.
This increase in traffic is accompanied by an increase in the volume of data stored in data centers, driven by “Cloud” and “Big data” facilities, which is even more considerable: +40% per year, or 1 Zettabyte in 2020 (Cisco, 2018). “Cisco estimates that 67 Zettabytes of “useful” data will be produced by the IoT and IIoT sectors in 2020, i.e. 35 times more than the storage capacity planned in data centers”.
This appetite for data is not going to stop anytime soon. More people are expected to get access to internet, what google call “the next billion user”, and the rise of 5G with data heavy application such as self-driving cars will pop-up very soon.
Toward a digital sobriety?
Digital technologies are far from being green. We need to move from addiction to sobriety. IT industry has been transforming the world in the past few decades, I sincerely hope that it will lead the way toward sustainability and resilience.
We need to radically change our usage but also how we design and build our devices and the web. Yes, I am part of the problem, we are all. But it’s up to us if we want to be part of the solution.
This topic is too important to be ignored, we first need to raise awareness about it. In my next articles, I will talk more about digital sobriety and concrete solution for a more sustainable and resilient future. Stay tuned.
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I am a UX Designer at Lighting Beetle, a design studio based in Bratislava.When I am not working on my agency’s projects, I am interested in designing human-centered products and services for a resilient and sustainable future. 🌱
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