It’s time we started to understand how technology drives the sustainable agenda

An article in Wired, “How the iPhone helped save the planet”, covers a topic that has interested me for a long time: the counter-intuitive idea that rather than leading to hyper-consumerism, technological development creates a net saving for society in terms of the resources used in the manufacture of new, replacement products.

I’ve been using the graphs produced by Statist for several years, as seen in the illustration (or this one) that visualize the replacement process we’ve all have been noticing for time. Before, we bought digital cameras, GPS devices and MP3 players, but all those functions — and many more — now come as standard in our smartphones or as apps. There are still consumer segments that continue to demand dedicated devices, but that demand has not only fallen hugely; some categories have been replaced entirely.

If we were to cast our eyes back, as Steve Cichon has, over some of the classic consumer electronics advertisements of the 1990s in newspapers and magazines, we see the magnitude of this substitution process: 13 of the 15 devices being advertised have been replaced today by the smartphone, which costs less than $1,000, has replaced a whole bunch of items adding up to several thousand dollars (Cichon estimates around $3,000, which updated for inflation is closer…