Dirty data: Firms count environmental costs of digital planet

Technology is often touted as a solution to the world’s environmental challenges, but it is also part of the problem: industry executives are facing rising pressure to clean up their energy and resource-intensive business.

How much energy, for example, does it take to send a onemegabyte e-mail?

Around 25 watts per hour, representing 20 grammes of carbon dioxide emissions, according to France’s CNRS research centre.

It might not seem like much, but the Radicati research group expects 293bn e-mails will be sent every single day this year and the power needs to be generated — mostly from fossil fuels.

Apps can quickly drain and shorten the life of phone batteries, with Snapchat a particularly “heavy” messaging service because it automatically turns on the camera.

Then there are the server farms crunching mammoth amounts of data worldwide, which require huge amounts of electricity both to run and to power airconditioning which keeps the equipment from getting too hot.

“Under the current global energy mix, the share of greenhouse gas emissions from information and communication technologies will rise from 2.5% in 2013 to 4% in 2020,” the French think-tank Shift Project said in a recent report.

That makes the sector more carbon-intensive than civil aviation (a 2% share of emissions in 2018) and on track to reach automobiles (8%), it said.

In February, Greenpeace warned about the concentration of data centres, in particular those used by Amazon, in the US state of Virginia, which reportedly help transmit 70% of the world’s Internet traffic.

To cope with the voracious energy needs, the local power company Dominion turned to non-renewable fuel sources — drawing the ire of tech firms.

Most have pledged to use as much “clean” energy from wind farms or other sources as possible, with Facebook signing a partnership with Greenpeace several years ago.

“The idea that the IT sector can help tackle climate change is not a new one — They’ve been talking about it for over 10 years, and what we need now to see is action,” said Gary Cook, an IT campaigner at Greenpeace.

“Given their rapid growth, decisions about how they get their power become really critical,” he said.

The surge in video and streaming services poses a particular challenge: already in 2017 Greenpeace estimated that the viral K-pop sensation “Gangnam Style”, viewed more than 2.7bn times, had consumed a year’s worth of production from a small power plant.

Video streaming now accounts for nearly 60% of all “downstream” Internet traffic from servers to individual devices, with Netflix alone generating 15%, according to an October report from US network analysis and services group Sandvine. Music services also take a toll. Tech executives say they’re taking action to shrink their environmental footprints.

The race to extract the rare-earth metals essential for modern phones and other devices, often leading to deforestation and water pollution, is also an environmental threat in Africa and Asia in particular.

The Shift Project notes as well that the push for smaller yet more powerful devices makes recycling even more costly.

“The energy needed to separate the metals increases as a function of the complexity of the assembly,” it warned.

The surge in video and streaming services poses a particular challenge