Computing and the

Environment
Ishtiaque Ahmed
Oct 27, 2021
Technology Life Cycle

Raw Material Use of Repair Disposal

Extraction Technology
Life Cycle and Different Stages of Impact
● Primary Impact: Making Technology
○ Resource Extraction
○ Component Manufacturing + Assembly of Technology
● Secondary Impact: Using Technology
○ Powering the Use of Technology
● Tertiary Impact: Discarding Technology
○ “Disposal” and the Impact of E-Waste
Primary Impact: Making Technology
Materials
● The materials that compose technologies do not come out
of a vacuum, and do not go out of existence once they are
done being used - tracing the origin and end-points of
devices that we use can illuminate aspects/injustices of the
supply/value chain that are previously unknown

● Q: Where do the materials for electronic information

technologies/devices come from? Is the history of these
materials ‘clean’?
● Q: When a device breaks down, what happens to it? Where
do the broken parts go?
Raw Material Extraction: Silicon
● Silicon is critical for the transistors in computer
chips that make up most modern information tech
devices - mostly sourced from quartz (SiO2)
○ Silicon must be in its pure form to be used for
transistors - a large amount of it is sourced
from Unimin’s Spruce Pine Quartz in North
Carolina as they have largely monopolized the
industry in the US Unimin’s quartz
○ The techniques and technologies used to Source: Jerry Whaley/Alamy

source and extract the silicon is extremely

secret
Raw Material Extraction: Cobalt
● Cobalt is essential for rechargeable lithium-ion
batteries in smartphones
● Cobalt miners (35,000 to 40,000 of which are children)
in the Democratic Republic of the Congo often face
extremely dangerous conditions with little in the way of
protection - lack mining maps, drills, protective
equipment, site safety precautions

Cobalt Mining Site

Source: Siddharth Kara
Raw Material Extraction: Cobalt
● Mining activity exposes communities to toxic
metals that cause a variety of health problems
● Miners account for 10-25% of the world’s cobalt
production, while 60% of worldwide cobalt is from
DRC in general
● The wealth that is generated by electronics using
cobalt is not reflected in the population mining it
○ Companies like Apple, Samsung, etc. Cobalt Mining Site
continue to profit off the lives of those in Source: Siddharth Kara
mineral rich developing countries -
continuing colonialism
Raw Material Extraction: Coltan
● Tantalum and niobium are used in the production of
high density capacitors for mobile phones and
cameras and can be extracted from Coltan ores
● Militia groups on the Democratic Republic of the
Congo often seek to control mineral deposits and the
trade of colton ore is mostly unregulated by the local
government or by the firms that do business in the
DRC
○ Local militia groups establish systems of forced labour,
Coltan Ore
including the use of children
Source: Rob Lavinsky
○ Smelting of ores is largely done by corporations from
USA, Germany, China, and Kazahkstan
Raw Material Extraction
● Mining of resources that are required for
batteries/transistors/etc. critical to modern technology often has
a devastating environmental impact in numerous ways
● Mining in a region can lead to the polluting/destruction of
ecosystems
○ Ex. Mining in Oklahoma has left a town so badly polluted it had to be
evacuated
○ Ex. Local endangered species at mining sites are hunted in the DRC
for food as miners risk starvation otherwise - local agricultural land is
now also used for artisanal mining making it no longer suitable for
agriculture
Salt flat in Bolivia where lithium rich brine is
○ Ex. Lithium mining in Bolivia has left the water table destroyed, mined. Source: Matjaž Krivic/INSTITUTE
polluting the earth and natural resources local farmers, people, and
animals rely on
Manufacturing: Toxic Elements
● The manufacturing process that occurs in the
building/assembly of technologies often has a
significant negative environmental impact
● Many chemicals needed to produce computer chips
are known carcinogens with many being released
into the air as emissions and contaminate local
groundwater
Manufacturing: Urban Sprawl
● As land is converted into urban parks/factories,
local species are affected or wiped out and
fertile land is no longer able to sustain plant
growth/farming
○ Ex. Santa Clara Valley (part of ‘Silicon Valley’)
used to have some of the world’s most fertile
soil and large quantities of produced prunes,
apricots, and cherries but has now been
converted
○ Smog and traffic congestion then affects air
quality and the health of local residents
Santa Clara Valley Source: Wikimedia
Commons
Manufacturing: Emissions
● The manufacturing process often constitutes a significant
portion of a particular technology’s emissions footprint
○ Ex. At Apple product manufacturing represents 74 percent of
overall emissions (of the production chain)
○ The smelting process for metals and the production of
computer chips results in significant GHG emissions
● Factories are often located in lower income regions,
manufacturing products and devices for higher income
customers - leaving lower income populations to bear the
brunt of environmental repercussions
Discussion
● Consider the implications of starting out the
computing life cycle with an unsustainable
foundation as in the case of resource mining in the
DRC for Apple products.
● Discuss implications from the following
perspectives for the DRC, Apple, and Apple Users,
so focusing perspectives in the DRC as well as
abroad:
○ Environmental
○ Public Health
○ Political
○ Ethical
○ For the Tech Industry more broadly
Cobalt Mining Site
Source: Siddharth Kara
Secondary Impact: Using Technology

Source: Digital Upswing by MUTI

Computing: Emissions
● The demand for for computing hardware,
software and services, and electricity is
growing
● The GHG emissions footprint for the ICT
(Information and Communications
Technology) Industry is steadily growing and
the landscape of which
devices/architectures are contributing to
emissions is shifting

Source: Assessing ICT global emissions footprint: Trends to 2040 &

recommendations
Computing: Emissions - Bitcoin
● Bitcoin mining accounts for about 0.2% of global electricity
consumption (2018)
● Tracking cryptocurrency electricity usage/emissions data is
difficult as it is poorly researched and hard to localize - a lack of
transparency surrounding who is mining for cryptocurrency and
where data centres that conduct mining are located make it
hard to track and understand impact
● The fact that a small select group of miners in a poorly regulated
‘field’ account for a significant amount of emissions without
return for the society they are located in could be of concern
Power Consumption: Data
Centres
● Data centres, and especially those that support cloud
computing and large tech corporations, require exorbitant
amounts of energy/electricity to power them
● Though electricity use has stayed relatively stable over past
years due to hyperscale data centres, it is projected that they
are likely to constitute a significant portion of energy demand,
with sizable data centres consuming the amount of electricity
that a small city would
● With many tech companies trying to use renewable energy -
this is still not the dominant source of electricity

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y
Power Consumption
Ex. Music Tech
Companies Source: ClickClean
Power Consumption
● Not just data centres are included in the impact of the
tech industry - any peripheral support that is
required to maintain and support the supply chain
would be considered in the scope of emissions
contributions
○ Ex. Office Networks, telecom operators
● As data centre impact grows so does smart phone,
tablet, notebook and other tech device use and all will
have a more significant impact in the future

Scope of a study determining emissions impact of ICT

Industry
An Individual Tech Artifact: Life Cycle Impact
● Production Energy - energy use that includes a full inventory of the
materials and processes involved, from the material extraction all the
way to shipment to the final customer
● Use Phase Energy - annual energy use/consumption of computing
devices
An Individual Tech Artifact: Life Cycle Impact
● Useful Life - the average length of time that a computing device should be
or or is actually used for (variable estimates)
● Lifecycle Annual Footprint (LAF) defined as the sum of the Use Phase
Energy (UPE) and Production Energy (PE) divided by the product Useful
Life (UL)
An Individual Tech Artifact: Life Cycle Impact
● Ultimately as each variable is subject to extreme variation and
change in the way of new innovative development and also
technological use trends it is hard to gauge the GHG/Carbon
emissions impact of technologies
Tertiary Impact: Discarding Technology

Source: Sophie Mo
E-Waste
● Discarded technologies contain numerous hazardous
materials that are released into the air, and seep into
groundwater, affecting local populations
● With the majority of e-waste shipped abroad, the
environmental impact is most strongly felt by the Global
South/developing countries

Source: Andrew Ray

What Can We Do?
Discussion:
● Taking into consideration the aspects of computing
discussed earlier in lecture, discuss what kind of
changes you would propose to address these issues?
● Discuss how you would specifically address of Google
and wastewater treatment that was introduced in ‘Big
Data Ecologies’
● What kind of changes would you implement at the:
○ Personal level?
○ Community level?
○ Industrial level?
○ Government level?
● What barriers would you face in trying to implement Google pipes at Georgia
data centre
such changes?
Need: Policy
● Impact at the level of policy could require data centres to shift energy use to
renewable sources with more tech corporations seeking to do so already
● Other policies could target the life cycle of devices such as policy to combat
planned obsolescence in smartphones (tech companies such as Samsung and
Apple have already been fined by the EU for PO strategies) and forcing providers
and companies to provide more room for repair of devices and encourage the
longer use of them
○ NGOs are working to enact legislative changes that would ensure longer functioning and
use of technologies Ex. Spain’s Friend’s of the Earth (Amigos de la Tierra)
Need: Increased Transparency
● Accountability is difficult to maintain as resource
extraction, component manufacturing, technological
assembly, and ultimate sale of the technology can be
occur in different places across the globe
○ Calls for increased transparency in the supply chain
can force organizations to be accountable for their
business practices without dodging accountability
Need: Increased Transparency
● Organizations like the Carbon Disclosure Project
encourage corporations to voluntarily submit
emissions data and aims to make environmental
reporting and risk management a business norm
Need: Green IT
● Green IT refers to environmentally sound
IT
○ The study and practice of designing,
manufacturing, using, and disposing of
computers, servers, and associated
subsystems
● Involves a holistic approach - target all
areas of the IT industry and the entire
lifecycle of IT devices
Need: Green IT
● Changing personal and corporate
behaviour to incorporate more
environmentally sound practices
○ Ex. Screensavers, powering systems off
when not in use, etc.
● Using IT itself for environmental
sustainability (ex. Modelling and AI to
determine issues and trends) to bring
awareness to environmental issues
Conclusion
● There is a systemic externalisation of harms onto communities and
ecosystems in impoverished areas far from the affluent districts
where the technologies are bought and utilised
○ Ex. Resource mining in Global South, factories located in impoverished
areas, e-waste being sent to Global South
Conclusion
● Emissions and ecological/environmental impact at every level of
computing
○ Primary Impact
■ Resource Extraction
■ Manufacturing
○ Secondary Impact
■ Corporate Computing: Virtual/Cloud Servers
■ Coordinated Computing: Bitcoin
■ Personal Computing: Your Tech Use
○ Tertiary Impact
■ E-Waste