Are digital and technological progress good for the environment?
The Covid-19 crisis has accelerated business digitalization, the development of online services and the spread of Information and Communication Technologies, forcing everyone to take the step to digitalization in order to keep working, to stay in touch with our relatives, to buy our groceries without exposing ourselves to the virus…
Some think digital can be seen as a “lever” for the ecological transition or should be used to tackle sustainable and environmental issues. Others even encourage the intersection of digital and ecological issues as “fundamental aspects” for the future. It is also acknowledged that digital can solve ecological problems and has a low environmental impact compared to other sectors. Spoiler alert: it is in fact a popular belief.
Digital is actually responsible for 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions and this rate is expected to double in 2025 — or to put it another way, in only 3 years. This would be equivalent to the CO2 emissions of the entire global car fleet today.
Rebound effect: why digital technological progress is not always good for the environment
Contrary to the popular belief that digital can improve the environment or in other words, the famous “sending an email has lower impact than printing something” ; digital amplifies environmental impacts: using the latest digital technologies can generate a decrease in the electrical consumption of the infrastructures, but it also triggers new energy consumption due to the use of additional digital devices and networks. Digital does not enable to reduce the environmental impact of other sectors. This is the notion of the rebound effect, aka the Jevons paradox.
The Shift Project initiative explains it in a very accessible way, and if you had to remember one thing about rebound effect, this would be the following: “Technological progress on energy efficiency has never been able to compensate for the increase in usage. It is therefore undeniable that the impact of digital technology will only increase if we do not give ourselves the means to control it.”
What is the current ecological impact of digital?
Since the rise of digital, it seems to be a popular belief that digital can solve ecological problems and has a low environmental impact compared to other sectors. It is not as simple to make such a statement, because the evaluation and measurement of the environmental impact of digital technology is laborious and lacks precision. As an example, the positive arguments stating digital can have a positive environmental impact, have little or no basis in fact. Studies often only offer a partial view of the environmental impact of digital due to an underestimation of the impact of fabrication and because they are focused on greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption.
This partly explains why, when you talk to your baker about digital pollution (yes, him again! And if you don’t know what I’m referring to, don’t hesitate to (re)read my first article right here), he retorts “We have to stop building servers anyway, that’s what’s warming the planet”. Below are some facts that you can use in response to raise his awareness.
The triptych you need to remember: final equipment, data centres and networks
The environmental impact of digital can be divided into 3 main categories: final equipment — this is where we can (and should) do the most at our level, data centres, networks.
Equipment
Final equipment is a term that describes the devices everyone uses in their everyday life to access digital. You are obviously thinking of smartphones, tablets, computers, laptops and TVs, but don’t forget the mice, e-readers, smartwatches, keyboards, printers, scanners to name but a few. There are currently 800 million of them on the planet, and this number is set to rise with the increasing use of electronic devices.
The production phase alone can account for up to 75% of the environmental impact of the electronic devices. High added value equipment such as computers, screens and smartphones require rare metals to be produced, and the extraction of such resources generates, among other things, water acidification, pollution and resources depletion, and energy consumption.
After the manufacturing phase, it is the use of electronic devices that consumes the most energy, particularly in terms of electricity consumption.
As the figures vary according to the methods used to carry out the studies and reports, what you need to remember is that it is these 2 phases of manufacture and use that have the greatest environmental impact with regard to electronic terminals.
And what happens when you decide to get rid of your old smartphone — which is a year old — and buy the latest one? Well, in 2020, only 20% of global waste from electrical and electronic devices (50 million tons) were recycled. It is in fact very hard to really estimate recycling efficiency: the definition of “recycled” is often fuzzy, which makes it possible to report recycling rates that are far from reality.
Data centres
First of all, what is a data centre? They often are composed of networked computers, storage systems and computing infrastructure which enable companies to manage their data. There are 45 million of them worldwide and this number is also expected to increase due to the rise of cloud computing offerings, which leads to the need for more places to host data and therefore the need for more data centres.
If you are more of a listener person, I recommend you to look at this short video below to understand what data centres are and what they are useful for.
What is the ecological problem with them? Data centres are physically made of electronic devices (computers, computing infrastructure…) — yes, the same type of equipment as above, the production of which generates water acidification, pollution and resource depletion, energy consumption and so on. Add to this the astronomical amounts of energy needed to operate and cool these centres: in 2021, data centres accounted for around 1% of global electricity demand and 25% of digital’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Networks
Let’s start at the beginning, what is actually behind this catch-all word? According to GeeksforGeeks, it “refers to the social network built through the use of digital technologies. It supports digital switching and digital transmission of voice, video, data, and other network services.” In order to build those networks, several devices are required, such as hubs, repeaters, bridges, switches, routers, gateways and brouters. You may find more detailed definitions in this article.
But what can I do on my own small scale to limit my impact?
You should strive for digital sobriety.
According to The Shift Project, “Digital sobriety consists in prioritising the allocation of resources as a function of uses, in order to conform to the planet’s physical boundaries, while preserving the most valuable societal contributions of digital technologies. This requires questioning the pertinence of how we use digital technologies”.
This is what you want to achieve as a digital consumer. You may find really concrete and useful tips to reduce the environmental impact of your digital consumption in this report of the Shift Project and in this video:
If you had to remember 3 things after reading this article, they would be:
- Among terminal equipment, data centres and networks, the former have the worst environmental impact. But the good news is that this is also where we can do the most, on our own scale.
- Technological advances in digital do not offset its environmental impact because digital use is growing faster than technological advances and their adoption: this is the notion of rebound effect.
- There are simple and concrete actions everyone can take to minimise your environmental impact when using digital technology.
And you? Have you already taken action to limit the impact of your digital consumption? Let me know in the comments!
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
