From MCMASTER UNIVERSITY
Data centres and smartphones will be the most damaging information and communications technologies to the environment by 2040, according to new research from W Booth School’s Lotfi Belkhir.
At the end of winter term in 2014, Lotfi Belkhir was approached by a student taking his Total Sustainability and Management course who asked, “What does software sustainability mean?”
The Entrepreneurship and Innovation Associate Professor at the W Booth School of Engineering Practice and Technology didn’t have an answer.
Belkhir teaches students to think creatively about sustainability tools that can be applied to their entrepreneurial ventures. But his tools, at the time, mainly applied to hardware startups, not software.
The student’s question sparked Belkhir’s latest research on the global emissions footprint of information and communications technology (ICT).
Belkhir, along with Ahmed Elmeligi, a recent W Booth grad and co-founder of the startup, HiNT (Healthcare Innovation in NeuroTechnology), studied the carbon footprint of consumer devices such as smartphones, laptops, tablets, desktops as well as data centres and communication networks as early as 2005. Their findings were recently published in the 2018 Journal of Cleaner Production.
Not only did they discover that software is driving the consumption of ICT, they also found that ICT has a greater impact on emissions than we thought and most emissions come from production and operation.
“We found that the ICT industry as a whole was growing but it was incremental,” Belkhir explains. “Today it sits at about 1.5%. If trends continue, ICT will account for as much as 14% for the total global footprint by 2040, or about half of the entire transportation sector worldwide.”
“For every text message, for every phone call, every video you upload or download, there’s a data centre making this happen. Telecommunications networks and data centres consume a lot of energy to serve you and most data centres continue to be powered by electricity generated by fossil fuels. It’s the energy consumption we don’t see.”
Among all the devices, trends suggest that by 2020, the most damaging devices to the environment are smartphones. While smartphones consume little energy to operate, 85% of their emissions impact comes from production.
A smartphone’s chip and motherboard require the most amount of energy to produce as they are made up of precious metals that are mined at a high cost.
Smartphones also have a short life which drives further production of new models and an extraordinary amount of waste.
“Anyone can acquire a smartphone, and telecommunications companies make it easy for people to acquire a new one every two years. We found that by 2020 the energy consumption of a smartphone is going to be more than that of PCs and laptops.”
Belkir has made policy recommendations based on his findings.
“Communication and data centres have to go under renewable energy now. The good news is Google and Facebook data centres are going to run on renewable energy. But there needs to be a policy in place so that all data centres follow suit. Also, it’s not sustainable to have a two-year subsidized plan for smartphones.”
With his latest research, Belkhir hopes to help students in his Total Sustainability and Management course expand their worldview.
“When they start the course, many students don’t know what sustainability means. When the course ends their worldview has changed and they realize what they want to do and why they want to do it.”
###
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
OMG, these people are stupid!
There are micrograms of gold on the chips and micrograms of rare earths in the LCD. Only the battery’s lithium and Al frame take any energy to produce, but they didn’t even mention them.
It takes about 10 W-hr a day to operate a phone, a fraction that of a notebook or land-line phone. It’s a super-computer by 10 year-old standards.
“We found that the ICT industry as a whole was growing but it was incremental,” Belkhir explains. “Today it sits at about 1.5%. If trends continue, ICT will account for as much as 14% for the total global footprint by 2040, or about half of the entire transportation sector worldwide.”
See that word “If”? Such a small word to be doing such a big job. Mark Twain had something to say about extrapolation, commenting on how the lower Mississippi had shortened by 242 miles in 176 years he estimated that a million years ago it must have been upward of 1.3 million miles long and that in 742 years it would be a mere mile and three quarters. He concluded: “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.” 🙂
love it
Data centers use large amounts of power!
So does the manufacture of steel, aluminum, glass, concrete, bricks and lots of other essential products that make the world we live in.
Would I want to live in a world free from the above? No.
Olden times are interesting to read about and study but not to live in.
Total Sustainability and Management course
The modern-age basket weaving? No, basket-weaving was at least harmless. This sounds like training for the new S.S. police.
‘Sustainability’ is intended to be the new ‘Global Warming’. It also requires us to pay more taxes, stop using fossil fuels, and have a lower standard of living.
Perhaps Mr. Belkhir should have reviewed the available literature on Google’s past investigations in renewables as profiled here at WUWT (https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-google-engineers-say-renewable-energy-simply-wont-work/). His comment about a hopeful future with renewable energy running Google data centers would not have sounded so clueless.
“It’s the energy consumption we don’t see.” Exactly. Same with electric cars and ethanol plants. If all the energy required to build and operate an electric car (including additional mining and refining) is considered, an electric car has the same carbon footprint as a similar car powered by an internal combustion engine. If all the energy required to produce a gallon of ethanol came from ethanol, ie. if all the tractors, trucks, ethanol plants, etc. were powered by ethanol, there wouldn’t be any left over to put in your gas tank.
“Since the late 1950’s, Microwave Radio Frequencies have become the dominant form of communication for TV’s, Cell Phones, Weather Stations, and a host of others uses. Each of these companies having MILLIONS OF SUBSCRIBERS! Satellite transmitters and Earth antennas transmit UHF and higher microwave frequencies all over the planet. Just like a Vacuum tube in old electronic technology, microwaves are insulated by the vacuum of space. Because the vacuum of space acts as an insulator, microwave radio frequencies are scattered through our atmosphere at an accelerated rate. The Earth is a rotating electromagnetic field containing a dielectric material called water. Sending oscillating microwave radio frequencies through an electromagnetic field into a dielectric material, such as water, creates radio frequency heating (also called RF heating) at the molecular level of water. ”
http://globalmicrowave.org/