Our smartphones are also driving climate change

Constantly buying new phones is wasteful and polluting

When we think about climate change, the main sources of carbon emissions that come to mind for most of us are heavy industries like petroleum, mining and transportation.

Rarely do we point the finger at computer technologies.

In fact, many experts view the cyberworld of information and computer technologies (ICT) as our potential saviour, replacing many of our physical activities with a lower-carbon virtual alternative.

That is not what our study, recently published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, suggests.

Having conducted a meticulous and fairly exhaustive inventory of the contribution of technologies — including devices like PCs, laptops, monitors, smartphones and tablets — and infrastructure like data centres and communication networks, we found that the relative contribution of them to the total global footprint is expected to grow from about one per cent in 2007 to 3.5 per cent by 2020 and reaching 14 per cent by 2040.

That’s more than half the relative contribution of the entire transportation sector worldwide.

Another disconcerting finding is that all this extraordinary growth is mostly incremental, essentially shattering the hope that information technology will help reduce the global carbon footprint by substituting physical activities with their virtual counterparts.

Perhaps the most surprising result of our study was the disproportionate contribution of smartphones.

We found that the relative emissions text message, video download, photo exchange, email or chat, there’s a 24/7 power-hungry server in some data centre that’s making it happen.

It’s the energy consumption that we don’t see.

Finally, and perhaps the most ironic aspect of all this, is that it’s software that is driving the overall growth in ICT as a whole, devices and infrastructure included.

Software companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo boast some of the largest data centres in the world. The rise in dominance of the mobile operating systems, namely Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, along with the millions of mobile applications that are built on top of those platforms, has spawned the mobile communication age.

The incredible — as well as unsustainable — growth in the emission footprint of all this hardware is there for only one purpose: To support and serve the software universe.

In other words, while it’s the hardware that does all the dirty work, it’s the software that’s calling all the shots.

At the societal level, we must demand that all data centres run exclusively on renewable energy.

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. Sadly, only one per cent of smartphones are being recycled today.