Devices, Data, Waste
When Basel Action Network (BAN), an electronic waste watchdog organization in Washington, implicated Total Reclaim — a purportedly reliable waste company — in a trash tracking investigation for covertly shipping LCD monitors overseas, it illustrated the complexities of pursuing environmental responsibility amidst the growth of online computing.
In a recent apology statement issued in response to BAN’s discovery of two mercury-containing monitors at an undocumented facility in Hong Kong, Total Reclaim cited business pressures such as a drop in commodity prices and increasing labor costs, and emphasized the “dramatically increasing volume of flat-screen devices” as contributing factors to its “ethical lapses.”
The study found that nearly one-third of 200 tracked devices had been sent overseas by multiple companies, including Dell Reconnect, a partnership with Goodwill. As a result of the investigation, the e-Stewards program, which counts Total Reclaim as a founding member, has revoked its certification for two years, while citing a “broken” economic and regulatory system that fails to provide “a sustainable and ethical electronics recycling infrastructure.”
This comes as device ownership and data creation are growing substantially. The Pew Research Center found that 36% of Americans owned three devices — a smartphone, computer, and tablet — in 2015, compared with 15% in 2012. This proliferation of devices has caused toxic impacts at unregulated overseas facilities, far outside the purview of customers.
Electronic devices comprise one of the fastest growing waste streams in the world.
Prior to disposal, their use is generating a secondary environmental footprint via WiFi and mobile Internet use, drawing on natural resources to power a sprawling network of cloud data centers that support increasing storage, sharing, and streaming. Lacking regulation beyond their status as industrial buildings, there is no public list of hyperscale data centers run by companies such as Google and Facebook, which make up a portion of the millions of small and large data centers globally. Operating through negotiations with local authorities and utilities, data centers use up to 100 to 200 times more electricity per square foot than a modern office building, according to the Digital Power Group. Diesel generators emit exhaust through routine testing for power outages, and lead-acid batteries are charged to power servers as generators start up. Servers are cooled via air conditioning or water consumption. Creative measures are increasingly taken to reduce waste, such as an Amazon campus that transfers data center heat to its Seattle offices.
Cloud computing has undoubtedly produced environmental benefits. Outsourcing IT functions to large cloud providers with optimized systems is more energy efficient than running server rooms at small organizations. WiFi-connected sensors can reveal potential energy reductions in buildings with metered utility bills.
However, high volume cloud usage is also taking a toll, from internal operations to the manufacture, transportation, and disposal of equipment. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that U.S. data center servers last an average of 4.4 years. A 2012 investigation by the New York Times estimated that the majority of electricity consumption by data center servers was utilized by idle machines waiting for a customer surge, with only 6–12% of the energy used to perform computations. That investigation also found more than a dozen major data centers cited for air quality violations in Virginia and Illinois.
In the last five years, a handful of public-facing cloud providers have pledged to move towards powering their data centers with 100% renewable energy. Google, Apple, and Facebook are leading the pack with investments in solar and wind power, while Salesforce, Rackspace, and Amazon Web Services are making slower progress towards this pledge, according to Greenpeace. Microsoft, which has achieved carbon neutrality through carbon credits and offsets, has similar plans. Hyperscale data centers, which are acquiring servers at a faster rate than small and shared (“collocated”) facilities, have achieved greater energy efficiency than their counterparts through virtualization, which reduces waste from idle servers.
Beyond data center operations, there are externalized impacts generated at each step that data and devices pass through. This includes coal-based energy powering online devices, hazardous electronic waste, and rare earth elements and water used to produce and run massive solar installations and wind farms supported by cloud providers. While data centers use about 2–3% of global electricity consumption annually, researchers Peter M. Corcoran and Anders Andrae estimated that the combined use of electronic devices, data centers, and networks utilized 7.4% of global energy consumption in 2012.
The growing volume of flat-screen devices cited by Total Reclaim reflects a simultaneous expansion of data processed throughout the cloud network, with global data center IP traffic expected to grow from 3.4 zettabytes in 2014 to 10.4 zettabytes in 2019, according to Cisco. Meanwhile, technological improvements may struggle to keep up. Bell Labs has found that while the energy efficiency of Information and Communications Technology infrastructure is growing at a rate of 10–20% per year, “an even greater energy efficiency improvement rate is needed to keep pace with the data traffic explosion.”
Achieving maximum efficiency and increasing the use of renewable energy to power data centers are two significant components within a greater web of environmental actions that will be needed to responsibly address the rise of cloud computing in all its visible and invisible instantiations. However, reducing the environmental impacts of the cloud will require a comprehensive approach that looks at each of its connecting pieces, far beyond the data centers that serve as its central hub.
Points: Emily F. Keller’s “Devices, Data, Waste” sets us thinking about the related and combined environmental effects of e-waste, data production and traffic, and data center hardware and infrastructure. What is to be done, humans? — Ed.
Emily F. Keller is the project coordinator for Ethics in Big Data Research at Data & Society. Research funding was provided by the National Science Foundation (#IIS-1413864).
