tech special issue /
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www.readMETRO.com november 2018
www.readMETRO.com november 2018
/ TECH SPECIAL ISSUE
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Peter Haff
Your gadg et is
Q&A
polluting Smartph o
Koen Arts,
assistant professor at the Netherlandsbased Wageningen University & Research and expert on human-wildlife interaction and conflict.
Is technology saving or destroying our planet? Both. Technology is a doublefaced monster. It hinders and enables, saves and destroys, includes and excludes, often at the same time. At the end of the day, technology is not destroying our planet, humans are. What are the main negative effects technology has on the planet? Technology underpins and promotes neoliberal ways of thinking. It makes things faster, more efficient, more targeted, creates bigger datasets, and larger networks. Liberal markets and economies tend to profit from that, while the natural
the plane t
nes are e years. M xpected to contr etro inve i stigates wbute the most to gl hether te chnologyobal footprint du ri saves or kills the ng the upcoming planet. Daniel Casillas
Metro World News
Technology has, without any doubt, made our life easier. However, it also puts the conservation of our planet in danger due to the enormous amount of devices we use every day. American scientist Peter Haff developed a concept of the so-called technosphere. According to Jan Zalasiewicz, a senior lecturer in geology at the University of Leicester, the UK, “it is a new Earth ‘sphere,’ joining and interacting with the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and biosphere. It is made of all of our technological machines and their products – and we humans and our institutions are also part of it”. Zalasiewicz’s calculations confirm that the technosphere
is really large. All of its physical components and waste products, including the fabric of our cities and the rubble they are built on, weight around 30 trillion tons, equivalent to approximately 50 kilograms for every square metre of the Earth’s surface. To compare, a recent estimate of the total mass of all of the Earth’s living organisms sums in just three trillion tons. The biggest problem with the presence of this ‘sphere’ is that in order to continue operating on this scale, the technosphere has to use enormous amounts of matter and energy, and the byproducts of this include waste gases such as carbon dioxide which is affecting on climate. Within this technosphere, the fastest growing technologies are those belonging to the Information and Commu-
nication Industry (ICT), which includes the Internet and all connected devices, such as computers, tablets and, of course, smartphones. Studies indicate that this sector is becoming one of the major contributors to the global carbon footprint. Research dubbed ‘Assessing ICT global emissions footprint: Trends to 2040 & recommendations,’ led by Lotfi Belkhir, associate professor & chair of Eco-Entrepreneurship at Canadabased McMaster University, warns that the ICT has received little attention as a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. Belkhir explained that unlike the popular belief that ICT helps replace polluting activities with cleaner ones, it also increasingly contributes to the global carbon footprint.
“Most of the usage of ICT is not flowing into replacing hard and dirty activities with soft and clean digital substitutes. Instead, we find that ICT has led to the emergence of a whole slew of digital activities, ranging from entertainment to social networking to commerce, all of which are mostly incremental and hence are adding a net and growing contribution to the global carbon footprint,” Belkhir told to Metro. In fact, the figures and estimates presented by the study reveal that the pollution generated by two branches of ICT, devices (PC’s, laptops, smartphones and tablets;) and infrastructure (data centres and communication networks), will register a significant increase in the medium and long term. It is ex-
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pected that the total global footprint of ICT as a whole is expected to grow from about 1 per cent in 2007 to 3.5 per cent by 2020 and reaching 14 per cent by 2040. By broad categories, ICT devices contribution would go from 210 Megatons of CO2-equivalent in 2010 to 400 Mt-CO2 by 2020. Smartphones are expected to contribute the most to the global footprint in the coming years. “When we isolated the contribution of smartphones, we found that the share of smartphones, relative to the total ICT industry, is expected to grow from 4 per cent in 2010 to 11 per cent by 2020, dwarfing the individual contributions of PCs, laptops and computer displays (around 6-7% each). In absolute values, emissions caused by smartphones will jump from 17 to 125 Megatons of CO2 equivalent per year (MtCO2e/yr) in that time span, or a 735 per cent growth,” Belkhir explained. But not only infrastructure
world suffers. Furthermore, it is often said that the Internet and other ICTs have a potential for greater social inclusion in decision-making, a better access to information and so forth. Certainly true in some cases, but often technology reinforces existing power structures and social inequalities. Technology is an amplifier: winners win more. Losers lose more. What about the positive effects? Technology can be really valuable when it stimulates new conceptualisations of problems and solutions. When it pushes boundaries, facilitates joint and creative thinking, and feeds into new forms of environmental action. How to stop the negative impacts? The problem is not technology itself, it is the dominant modes of thinking and acting (consumerism, neoliberalism, etc.) that deploy technology.
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actionsto reduce pollutionby technology
and devices generate carbon footprint. Any Internet activities are doing so as well. For example, sending an email has a footprint equivalent of 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide emissions or even sending a Tweet generates .02 grams of CO2.
Putting that thought aside though, on a practical level individual consumers are increasingly and rightfully occupied with high grade energy labels on the products they buy. Now we also need production labels. What’s the point of having ‘smart’ solar panels on your roof, when the raw materials were mined leaving huge scars in ecosystems and displaced local communities, when they flew through a production chain that involved appalling working conditions and child labour, and were shipped in with a colossally polluting container ship? The social and environmental impact of each product should be systematically graded and made visible. Technology can play a role in this! Could technology eventually become 100 per cent eco-friendly? Yes. And we are as far away from that as from the Stone Age hunter-gatherers who used rocks and deer antlers.
What to expect in the future? Don’t get too excited. At the end of the 19th century a lot of people got really thrilled about the telephone, and how it was going to revolutionise society. It did, in some ways, yet very little reference is made to telephones on gravestones from that era. Similarly, the Internet of Things, virtual reality technologies, blockchain and synthetic biology all represent huge promises and potential changes. This is all in vein if ethical and sustainability questions remain unaddressed in the minds of people. How a Metro reader could contribute? Each Metro reader should turn to the nearest stranger, and make a promise to help save the world. Technology comes in handy here: this promise should be recorded by the stranger with a mobile phone, and replayed whenever you meet again. Interview by Dmitry Belyaev, MWN
1) All new data centres must
be required to run 100 per cent on renewable energy, while existing ones must gradually shift towards it.
2) More research is needed to greener communications networks, ranging from towers and mobile phone stations to switches and routers to wired, wireless and smart grid networks. 3) Smart phones are becoming a growing source of technological
But what can we do? According to professor Belkhir “we must demand that all data centres run exclusively on renewable energy.” “Also, smartphones have a very high relative content of gold and rare earth materials, which are extremely dirty to mine. We
pollution, and one of the main factors is the short lifespan they currently have, so it is necessary to extend the lifespan of these devices to four or more years.
4) Companies
should migrate most of their workforce away from desktops and even laptops towards highperformance lowpower tablets. These devices consume a fraction of the energy of traditional laptops and desktops, and come with a much lower production footprint.
must encourage manufacturers to move to a more cyclical manufacturing process allowing the full-value recycling of smartphones and ICT devices in general. Finally, at the individual level: hold on to your smartphone for as long as you can, and when you do upgrade, make sure you recycle your old one,” he concluded.
Duke University scientist and creator of the Technosphere term What is Technosphere? The technosphere comprises the complete set of globally interlinked techno-sociological systems, such as the world’s power, transportation, information, and financial networks, plus governmental, educational, scientific, health, and military bureaucracies, and other institutions, including all the components of these systems, i.e., the world’s technological artefacts and members of the global human population. Thus, you and I are parts of the technosphere. The technosphere is the Earth’s newest sphere, joining the atmosphere (air), hydrosphere (water), lithosphere (rock), and the biosphere. How is it affecting the planet? The technosphere is responsible for much of the recent increase in global air temperature, melting of the ice sheets and glaciers, for sea level rise, for widespread contamination of air, soils (agriculture) and of water sources, for the current high rate of biological extinction, for the jump in number of invasive species, for the explosion of the human population, for the emergence of dense local artificial structures (cities), for globe spanning infrastructure, and for the creation and wide distribution of many chemical compounds and materials that had no previous existence on the Earth, for example concrete, steel, aluminium (as a metal) and many radioactive elements. Is global geology changing as a result of the technological impact? Yes, for example, changes in air temperature and rainfall affect the formation and erosion of soils both directly and also indirectly through effects on plants and animals on the planet’s surface, which in turn can have chemical and physical impacts on
“The technosphere is the Earth’s newest sphere, joining the atmosphere (air), hydrosphere (water), lithosphere (rock), and the biosphere.” the Earth’s surface geology. What is the mankind’s technological impact on the planet? Humans alone, prior to the evolution of a high level of technology, were able to make only minor, local changes to the planet. Over time, as the technosphere emerged, humans and technological artefacts became integrated together into the technosphere, which impacts the planet strongly as discussed above. The technosphere cannot exist without humans, but similarly, the modern human population could not exist without the support of the technosphere (food, energy, materials etc). So mankind’s technological impact on the planet is perhaps better thought of as the technosphere’s impact on the planet, some examples of which are mentioned in response to your earlier questions. Have we changed our planet forever? Yes. For example the biosphere has been irreversibly altered by extinction and introduction of invasive species. Even if humans and the technosphere were to collapse and disappear tomorrow, aliens landing on the Earth a million years in the future would be able to infer from the fossil record the occurrence of a planet-changing episode in Earth history. interview by Daniel casillas, MWN