No such thing as „green ICT“ Anastasius Gavras Eurescom GmbH

Green ICT Term „Green computing“ dates back to 1992 – Context was TCO Today it is hard to overlook references to green IT/ICT – Mostly related to energy consumption, power management, CO 2 and other GHG emmissions – „en vogue“ Green IT  Google results

Lacking complete picture Immature definition of „green IT/ICT“ Need to use the term more widely than CO 2 and GHG Discuss the overall environmental impact Talk about environmental sustainability of the sector

Effects of ICT 1 st order: mere physical existence of ICT – production, use and end-of-life treatment 2 nd order: application of ICT leads to – optimisation of processes in other sectors (e.g. traffic optimisation) – substitution (e.g. e-processes replace traffic) – Induction (e.g. create more demand in other sectors) 3 rd order: societal changes that ICT brings along – deep structural change towards a dematerialised economy – increased dependency on a critical infrastructure – rebound effects

Rebound effects Stimulation of increased demand due to time-saving optimisation (e.g. increased leisure time traffic) Software-induced hardware obsolescence Miniaturisation paradox, which indicates that hardware is getting cheaper faster than it is getting smaller Jevons Paradox, is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource (by English economist William Stanley Jevons, 1865)

First order effects Environmental impacts caused by material use in manufacturing and recycling – Fossil fuels, ultra-pure water, chemicals – Compound materials of a wide range of chemicals, elements and heavy metals – Some materials, have a high recovery and recycling efficiency (platinum 95%) – Other materials cannot be recycled at all (e.g. mercury, arsenic, barium) – Exposure to toxic materials We must make a shift from calculating CO 2 /GHG emissions to evaluating the net impact of the technology life-cycle – Including operations, use considerations, and end-of-life management

Outsourcing the problem? The production of a desktop PC uses three times the energy this PC will consume in one year – Considering the aggregated environmental impacts, the ratio is 6:1 under Chinese conditions (citation from OECD workshop, Copenhagen, May 2008) Hidden environmental cost – Trend to produce a large part of the global ICT equipment demand in countries with lower environmental constraints during production – This outweighs all efforts we undertake in developed economies to minimise the environmental impact of ICT

Impact of 2 nd and 3 rd order effects Projections of the development of environmental indicators are based on many uncertainties caused by – Future scenario variation – Available data uncertainty The total future energy consumption could: – on worst-case assumptions increase by 37% – on best-case assumptions decrease by 17% The GHG emissions could: – under worst-case assumptions increase by 32% – under best-case assumptions decrease by 29% Similar uncertainties about the environmental impact are concluded for non-recycled municipal solid waste EC, JRC, The Future Impact of ICTs on Environmental Sustainability, IPTS Technical Report EUR 21384, August 2004

e-waste management pays off E.g. in environmental terms due to the materials recovered, saving energy otherwise used for their primary production Some elements are very sparse on earth – Example: indium (In), a rare chemical element with soft, malleable and easily fusible properties – Uses in production of LCDs accounting for 50% of its world- wide consumption – Based on the current world-wide reserve base of economically-viable indium there is only ~13 years' supply of indium left Critical dependency of the European (and global) industry on rare earths

Opinion Unless we are able at some point in time to write down the whole equation related to environmental sustainability of ICT, we should very cautiously talk about “green ICT” Some references – OECD Workshop on ICTs and Environmental Challenges, _1_1_1_1,00.html – EC, JRC, The Future Impact of ICTs on Environmental Sustainability, IPTS Technical Report EUR 21384, August 2004 – there-is-no-such-thing-as-green-ICT.asp – inside.asp