The Challenge of Greening IT

Gothenburg.
Today’s keynote at AoIR 2010 looks like it’s actually taking place, after the withdrawal of Jon Bing due to illness yesterday. Peter Arnfalk is the speaker, and his topic is ‘green IT’: a significant buzzword at the moment, which is nonetheless poorly defined so far. There is a substantial potential for CO2 emission reductions through IT – for greening through IT: it has been calculated that the EU’s CO2 emissions could be reduced by some 15% through IT by 2020, for example. This could be done through reductions in the transport sector, the electricity grid, and in building emissions which It solutions can provide.

Much of what drives this are economic factors: greening through IT reduces costs as well as emissions, as it turns out (as well as having further social benefits: a win-win-win situation, Peter says). However, ICTs also generate emissions: they account for some 2% of global CO2 emissions world-wide (roughly the same amount as generated by aviation), and 8% of EU electricity consumption stems from ICT use (projected to rise to 10% by 2020).

Indeed, the use of electricity for running the Internet (currently at 1%) is set to quadruple in the near future, and 15% of residential electricity is related to ICT use (with a sevenfold increase projected between 1990 and 2030). By 2030, 1700 TWh (terawatt hours) will be used for ICT world-wide. We can even pinpoint the energy consumption of particular uses, in fact: 1998 there were 10,000 searches per day on Google; by 2009 there were more than 300 million per day – and one Google search emits around 0.2g of CO2.

Another major environmental problem related to ICT is e-waste: this is growing by some 40 million tons per year, and the manufacture of mobile phones and PCs consumes a substantial amount of raw materials which at the end of these devices’ lifetimes are very difficult to re-extract and recycle. There is now a global e-waste shipment industry, and informal (and environmentally highly problematic) recycling processes for e-waste in the receiving countries. We need to rethink the lifecycle of ICT devices as not just from cradle to grave, but from cradle to cradle, Peter suggests. Only in the EU is this starting to happen, at least in a small way (hand-back schemes for old mobile phones have been set up, for example).

The economic and environmental costs of the IT sector are substantial – the extraction of resources and informal recycling would cost some 2000 billion Euros per year, which is comparable to the global telecommunications market per annum. There’s also a need to be greening IT itself, then: through eco-efficiency (less environmental impact), (d)e-materialisation (replacing physical products with online services), and new solutions for societal functions (telework, online meetings, e-banking, distance education, etc.), and environmental informatics (environmental management systems).

There are a variety of direct effects from IT (life cycle, raw materials, energy consumption, etc.), indirect effects (second-order effects like efficiency gains and reduced physical travelling), and systems effects (third-order effects such as changing consumption patterns, a relocation of businesses and dwellings, and rebound effects). And such effects can also result in increased consumption (as more purchasing power becomes available due to savings elsewhere), the emergence of new products and services, and other additional changes.

Swedish research on green(ing) IT focusses on application areas like energy efficiency, environmental analysis and monitoring, intelligent transport systems, industry monitoring and control, process organisation and smart housing; additional interests include dematerialisation, telework, urban planning, energy production and distribution, virtual meetings, simulations, and design for the environment. More than 40% of these projects looked at user behaviours, interestingly. Most commonly, in order, such work addressed transport, construction, public, trade, and manufacturing sectors. For example, projects might focus on monitoring marine environments, developing intelligent housing, or promoting dematerialisation.

However, funding was often simply for IT or environmental projects – explicitly ‘green IT’ projects are not prioritised by funding agencies so far. The future impact of IT on environmental sustainability is an important area of research, but outcomes all to often get reduced to some very high-level executive summaries that remain formulaic in their approach. What is also possible is to identify those ICT applications which will have the most significant environmental impact in future years.

The policy perspective on green IT policy is mixed: some 50 governments world-wide have introduced green IT policy initiatives, with another 42 policy initiatives by business associations. Overall OECD recommendations in the field focus on coordinating ICT, climate, environment, and energy policies; in the EU, the Waste of Electrical and Electronic Equipment, the Restriction on the Use of Hazardous Substances, and the Eco-Design Requirements for Energy-Using Products directives have each been important, and there is an agenda for a ‘green knowledge society’ which aims to create green ICT products and services markets, understand and exploit substitution mechanisms, and harness ICTs in non-ICT sectors.

In Sweden, too, an agenda for IT and the environment will be launched shortly, promoting the procurement and operation of green IT products as well as a shift in meeting culture that focusses more strongly on virtual meetings. But there also is already a long history of public ‘IT and environment’ reports, which has so far failed to generate substantial outcomes.

Finally, business perspectives on green IT take yet another view; here, the focus is largely on virtualisation and server consolidation, changing user behaviour, improving system management, and datacentre efficiency tools. Green IT strategies are also differently prominent across different EU countries (51% in German companies, leading the field). The drivers for such changes are mainly the potential for cost reduction, the need for legal compliance, and the aim to make energy consumption more sustainable.

So, overall, then, what results from the efforts across these three sectors: certainly, there is some reduction in paper usage, but ‘paperless’ strategies can also result in duplication (e-tickets plus paper tickets, for example), or even in an increase of paper usage. In recent years, paper usage has grown more than overall GDP in many countries, though this has changed with the advent of the global recession. This also has employment impacts, of course – for example for conventional postal services.

For the UK Royal Mail, for example, 2007 was ‘peak letter’ – the last year in which the volume of paper letters still increased; since then it’s declined. Interestingly, a traditional letter generates some 20-25g of CO2, while an email generates some 4-9g (spam: less than 1g, since it’s the reading of email that generates most emissions) – however, the increase in emails means that the emissions from email overall are some 7-20 times that of traditional mail.

So how can we green IT? First, design is important – we need to aim to further dematerialise, extend the lifecycle and durability of products, use fewer harmful materials, lower our energy use, and make our devices more recyclable. Production processes also need to minimise lifecycle costs, focussing on up- and downstream costs in the production chain. We need to buy and sell services, not products, create technology that can be used for energy efficiency, transport substitution and efficiency, and find new ways of working, communication, and consuming services that are also fun, so that people end up using them.