ecologies

This page considers the ecological impact of the internet and the 'information economy', exploring claims that digital is necessarily greener and cleaner.

It covers -

• introduction – questions about ideologies, expectations and uncertainties in exploring the environmental impact of the net
• energy - conflicting claims about whether a wired economy necessarily uses (or merely wastes) less energy
• dematerialisation and the glass pipeline – does virtuality and disintermediation involve a reduction in energy and material use
• mobility and clustering – digital nomads, congestion pricing, dot-com clustering and other geospatial issues
• waste – packaging, consumption and 'e-waste' and other technotrash
• displacement – offshoring pollution along with production?
• studies – major works on the internet, digital economy and environment

     introduction

For enthusiasts one reason for the 'newness' of the 'new economy' is that it is supposedly cleaner and greener than superseded smokestack or rustbelt economies, with greater uptake of digital technologies being associated with a significantly reduced impact on local and global ecologies in the short and long terms.

The vision is one of the machine in the garden, far far from the madding crowds, toxic waste dumps or ugly smokestacks … a post-industrial collage of Bambi meets the iPod, telework and responsible consumption by enlightened consumers.

Others have expressed alarm about the energy requirements of the digital economy or insidious (because invisible) ecological damage.

Anxieties about energy use are for example evident in claims that the proliferation of online devices has "staggering implications for the thermoelectrical power complex" and that around 50% of US electricity production will be consumed by "the Internet and E-commerce activity". A salient statement is The Internet Begins With Coal: A Preliminary Exploration of the Impact of the Internet on Electricity Consumption, a 1999 study by Mark Mills for the Greening Earth Society (a US utilities advocacy organisation).

Others have more prosaically claimed that developed economies are "drowning in plastic" and - having run out of landfill for burial of obsolete personal computers, fridges and other junk - are being "forced" to offshore waste disposal in a grim echo of offshoring jobs.

Alas, the evidence for many claims is problematical.

There is considerable uncertainty about the local/global environmental impact of the net, with benefits apparently often being offset by disadvantages and the significance of particular problems being overstated by some champions. Particular statistics, including some that are recurrently featured in studies by government and advocacy groups, sometimes confuse substances used in manufacturing processes rather than incorporated in each shipped item and generally do not include comparisons with past practice.

     energy

How much energy is used to run the internet (cables, servers, personal computers, other devices) and more broadly power "the internet economy"? What is the rate of growth?

The answers to those questions are unclear.

As we have indicated in highlighting some studies below there is major disagreement about base data and projections. Although devices are broadly becoming more efficient, there are more of them within developed economies - access to a single phone, for example, no longer suffices - and growth of emerging economies is being reflected in uptake of phones, personal computers, servers, televisions and radios.

It is sometimes claimed that PDAs and similar devices are innately 'green' because they are not drawing power from a grid or generating thermal pollution. However, an assessment of their overall impact might include costs involved in battery production.

What is the impact of the domestic personal computer and non-commercial uses such as burning CDs of fileshared music? There are few comprehensive audits. Electricity use in an average Australian household as of 2001 is claimed to be -

use water heating fridge/freezer air heating/cooling lighting audio/video cooking washing and ironing pool pump other

% 33 20 14 8 7 6 3 3 6

Adding an internet fridge, PDA or mobile phone or two is thus unlikely to have a fundamental impact.

Some analysts have suggested that much of the energy used by server farms or web hotels is attributable to the cooling requirements of those facilities, rather than power to keep the hard drives spinning and signals going out of the building. Jennifer Mitchell-Jackson suggests that server farms across the US used no more than 0.12% of all US electric power at the end of 2000, in contrast to claims that the growth of server farms in and around Seattle would require around 1,100 megawatts a day (roughly the amount of power used by the entire city, including manufacturers such as Boeing).

The experience of Seattle - and other hubs such as New York, where a projected farm was claimed to have double the power requirements of the former World Trade Center towers - is not typical of most of the US or other parts of the world. That is demonstrated in Matthew Zook's 1998 paper on The Web of Consumption: The Spatial Organization of the Internet Industry in the US - illustrating how supposedly 'spaceless' new economy industries cluster in specific locations - and Manuel Castells' The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring & the Urban-Regional Process (Oxford: Blackwell 1989).

Does the net mean that we are going to run out of energy? Arguably not, with the real questions instead relating to the sourcing and cost of energy supplies, the location of power stations and responsibility for externalities (whether they're local such as the disposal of ash from a coal-fired power station or the contentious greenhouse effect).

John Laitner's 2005 Economic Policy Models and Alternative Future Scenarios: Decided Room for Improvement (ppt) notes that since 1970 energy efficiency (ie improvements in production, distribution and use) has met 75% of new energy service demands in the US.

     dematerialisation and the glass pipeline

Internet pundits and digital economy cheerleaders such as NOIE have often claimed that 'dematerialisation' of the economy will result in substantial energy and commodity savings.

Those claims encompass major reductions in -

• paper production (and associated transport and storage savings) through adoption of the paperless office
• paper used for newsprint and junkmail, with consumers presumed to rely on electronic media.

An example is the 1997 statement that -

By 2003, e-materialization of paper alone holds the prospect of cutting energy consumption by about 0.25% of total industrial energy use and net [greenhouse gas] GHG emissions by a similar percentage. By 2008, the reductions are likely to be more than twice as great. We also believe the Internet Economy could render unnecessary as much as 3 billion square feet of buildings - some 5% of U.S. commercial floor space - which would likely save a considerable amount of construction-related energy. By 2010, e-materialization of paper, construction, and other activities could reduce U.S. industrial energy and GHG emissions by more than 1.5%.

A 2005 study by Ralph Gay, Robert Davis, Don Phillips & Daniel Sui on Modeling Paradigm for the Environmental Impacts of the Digital Economy more ambitiously suggested

40% to 50% reduction in life cycle energy and pollutant expenditures with e-commerce in the personal computer industry

although it is unlikely that B2B gains in that industry will - or can - be replicated in other sectors.

Forecasts of the paperless office have been debunked in works such as The Myth of the Paperless Office (Cambridge: MIT Press 2001) by Abigail Sellen & Richard Harper which note that paper use has substantially increased, partly because ready access to textprocessing software and printers has encouraged iterative production of drafts - a luxury in the era of handwriting and manual typewriters - and the proliferation of reports, memoranda and letters.

More persuasive case has been made for savings through 'just in time' production, with manufacturers leveraging the 'glass pipeline' to reduce inter-firm and intra-firm waste in material and transport costs. Claims in reports such as Virtual dematerialisation: ebusiness and factor X (PDF) have however been disputed, with critics noting that mooted savings often are not achived in practice or suggesting that customisation encourages "frivolous" production

     mobility and clustering

Futurists have similarly forecast major savings regarding -

• public transport infrastructure, particularly in cities, as consumers will identify and purchase goods electronically rather than travelling to retail premises
• damage to the ozone layer and the construction of hotels, with people relying on electronic communications rather than travelling by air for face to face contact
• the need for office accommodation - indeed in cities (which as noted earlier in this guide are an apparent bugaboo of futurists such as George Gilder) - because people will efficiently telecommute from an unspoiled rural location rather than crowding into a tower in a central business district.

Such claims appeared naive when first articulated and have not improved over time.

Telecommuting, for example, hasn't eliminated the office; it has instead meant that some workers are 'on call' at all times. Connectivity appears to have resulted in increased rather than decreased travel: face to face remains important.

Etailing appears to have displaced rather than reduced logistics, as the commodity still has to get to the consumer. It may indeed be more environmentally friendly to visit a retailer and put the woolly jumper under your arm rather than receive it - and the packaging - from an etailer via a delivery service.

     waste

There is similar controversy about the extent and treatment of waste, whether that is 'technotrash' such as superseded personal computers, mobile phones and microwave ovens or more traditional junk such as discarded packaging, furniture, industrial equipment and even disposable nappies.

Elsewhere we have noted claims that the average amount of Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment (WEEE) disposed of by a single EU consumer of over a lifetime is 3 tonnes, with the UK for example disposing of over 1 million tonnes of computer monitors, servers, personal computers and mobile phones (along with 500,000 television sets and 3 million refrigerators) every year.

Some of the more alarmist calls for action include -

More than 250 million computers in the United States may become obsolete in the next five years, and those machines, along with televisions, VCRs and cell phones, are flooding the nation's landfills. As a result, substances such as lead, mercury, chromium and cadmium are seeping into the environment

and

Electronic equipment may contain lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium and flame-retardants. These materials can be hazardous if improperly managed at end-of-life. A typical desktop computer monitor contains approximately two kilograms of lead. [That claim is difficult to believe unless the device is shielded like a nuclear reactor]

and

The lack of environmentally sound computer recycling operations has led to e-waste being responsible for 70% of all heavy metals found in U.S. landfills today.  ... Since our recycling programs cannot handle the vast amounts of waste, up to 80% of the e-waste is actually exported to Asia, where it ends up in riverbeds or is illegally and improperly disposed

The Swiss federal government's e-Waste Guide site more sensibly notes that

The formation or discharge of hazardous emissions during the recycling of electrical and electronic equipment depends highly on the handling of electronic waste. Hence hazardous substances contained in computers and televisions don't lead automatically to a risk for the environment and the human health. Some recycling processes (as cable burning) applied in transition and developing countries can cause serious health problems and contaminate air, water and soil.

Although the annual volume of garbage has increased over the past 50 years that is consistent with population growth (with the number of people in the US and Australia doubling since the early 1930s and tripling since the 1890s. Per capita domestic waste has not shown a marked increase over the past half century. Growth in domestic and industrial waste - of the technotrash variety or otherwise - has arguably been offset by reductions in other waste, with claims for example that at the turn of last century the average US consumer was responsible for around 1200 pounds of coal ash and 20 pounds of manure per year.

A perspective on claims about the prevalence of e-waste in domestic landfill is provided in Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage (Tucson: Uni of Arizona Press 2001) by William Rathje & Cullen Murphy, suggesting that paper accounts for around 40% of volume in domestic landfill. Newspapers supposedly accounting for 13% of the total volume of US domestic fill, with a year's New York Times occupying the space of 18,660 crushed aluminum cans.

The energy requirements for producing and distributing the Times (turning trees into paper, getting ink onto the dried treeflakes and getting the resultant publication into the hands of the consumer) versus the cans or devices for online publications are unclear.

     displacement

Hyperbole about the likelihood of e-waste leaching into the water supply or ending up in the food chain has resulted in offshoring of waste disposal along with manufacturing.

In the US it is claimed that around 15% of obsolete personal computers arrive in local landfills, with a further 10% going to community organisations for reuse or to secondary markets for salvage or resale. Reuse is inhibited by hardware limitations (the average consumer cannot do much with a 1980s diskette) or software incompatibility. Supposedly 75% of PCs, printers and other e-devices just "sits around" in garages or other storage; it is likely that there is much surreptitious dumping - in breach of local/national ordinances such as the US Resource Conservation & Recovery Act.

Such legislation, which often makes manufacturers or distributors responsible for end-of-life disposal of devices, has encouraged shipment of equipment to locations where -

• low labour costs and OH&S standards enable components to be salvaged (eg circuit boards can be melted down to recover metals, cables can be stripped to recover the copper wire, PC cases can be chipped to recover plastics)
• governments either encourage burial of foreign hardware (eg heavy equipment with PCB or asbestos) or turn a blind eye to its illicit disposal

The UK Environment Agency suggested in 2004 that some 23,000 tonnes of ICT hardware had gone offshore illegally, typically to jurisdictions such as China, west Africa, Pakistan and India.

Concerns about exports of technotrash are highlighted in the Basel Action Group's 2002 Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia (PDF), Eric Williams' 2005 International activities on E-waste and guidelines for future work (PDF) or Robert Bortner's Asia Near East (ANE) Computer Recycling and Disposal (E-Waste) paper (doc).

     Studies

'Big picture' perspectives are provided by Bjorn Lomborg's controversial The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2001) and Global Crisis, Global Solutions (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2004) and by Jeremy Leggett's The Carbon War: Dispatches from the End of the Oil Era (London: Allen Lane 1999).

The landmark 1999 The Internet & Global Warming report by Joseph Romm, Arthur Rosenfeld & Susan Herrmann of the Center for Energy & Climate Solutions claimed economic growth of 8% in the US during 1997-98 and noted that energy consumption grew by only 1% rather than the expected 10%. That difference was attributed to the new economy and has been the basis of claims that 'being online' will result in substantial systemic reductions in energy demand.

Jay Hakes' lucid 2000 The Potential Impacts of Computers and the Internet on Electricity Consumption disagreed, attributing lower demand in 1997-98 to an unusually mild winter and commenting sensibly that

it is too soon to come to any conclusions as to the precise path of electricity use resulting from internet and internet-based commerce.

As noted above, the 1999 The Internet Begins with Coal: A Preliminary Exploration of the Impact of the Internet on Electricity Consumption report by Mark Mills - echoed in a Forbes polemic by Mills and Peter Huber - estimated "internet related" electricity use at around 8% of all US electricity use in 1998 and growing to half of all electricity use in the current decade. The report was produced for the Greening Earth Society - one of the coal industry lobby groups fighting the 'carbon wars' - but there have been similar claims from figures such as George Gilder.

The report was criticised as fundamentally flawed. A 1999 critique (PDF) by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) for example suggested that the figures should be reduced by a factor of eight. LBL analysts estimated the annual electricity consumption of all the office and network equipment in the United States at about 74 terawatt hours. That was 2% of national consumption, rising to 3% if the cost of manufacturing the hardware was included.

Criticism has not, however, inhibited claims that Silicon Valley was responsible for the Californian power crisis or that internet hosting facilities ('server farms' or 'web hotels') guzzle more juice than some US states. One inference has been that there is an emerging power crisis in the US and other counties, thanks to the web, so restrictions on nuclear plants, inefficient coal-fired power stations and other nasties should be reduced.

The LBL Information Technology & Resource Use (PDF) study by Jennifer Mitchell-Jackson assessed energy use by data centres, explores why most estimates are significantly too high and supplies substantive rather than anecdotal figures for five facilities. The study drew on her Masters thesis (PDF) of May 2001 regarding electricity used by data centres. The thesis supplies measured top down (billing data) and the bottom up (counting equipment and measuring or estimating actual power used for each piece of equipment, then adding it up) data. Overall, the best estimate of power used by US centres is under 0.12% of all electric power consumption at the end of 2000.

The study reflects previous LBL research about the impact of information technology on resource use. In 1995 the Lab published a comprehensive assessment of power used by commercial-sector office equipment (PDF). It offered a point by point rebuttal (PDF) of Congressional testimony by Mills, during an inquiry that featured suggestions that the net - like photocopiers - should be turned off at night. Measurements in the second major assessment (PDF) of office equipment energy use released in June 2001 were consistent with forecasts in the 1995 study.

The new report suggested that total electricity used by all office equipment in the US was around 2% of all electricity consumption. Power used for all telecommunications, network and office equipment (including electricity used to manufacture the stuff in plastic boxes) accounted for around 3% of total US electricity consumption. Commercial sector office equipment electricity use is within 15% of that predicted for 2000 in the 1995 report, with the difference being attributed to by more people leaving their computers and printers on at night than envisaged in 1995.

Attempts at modelling the broader impact of the net or electronic commerce have been contentious, given disagreement about basic definitions, the muddiness of much data and questions about extrapolation.

Two examples are the 2001 OECD paper by H. Scott Matthews & Chris Hendrickson on Economic and Environmental Implications of Online Retailing in the United States (PDF), Klaus Fichter's 2001 paper for the German federal environment ministry on Environmental Effects of E-Business and Internet Economy: First Insights and Environment-political Conclusions (PDF).






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