Elsevier

Journal of Cleaner Production

Volume 177, 10 March 2018, Pages 448-463
Journal of Cleaner Production

Assessing ICT global emissions footprint: Trends to 2040 & recommendations

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.12.239 Get rights and content

Abstract

In light of the concerted efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) per the so-called Paris Agreement, the Information and Communication Industry (ICT) has received little attention as a significant contributor to GHGE and if anything is often highly praised for enabling efficiencies that help reduce other industry sectors footprint. In this paper, we aim at assessing the global carbon footprint of the overall ICT industry, including the contribution from the main consumer devices, the data centers and communication networks, and compare it with the to the total worldwide GHGE. We conduct a detailed and rigorous analysis of the ICT global carbon footprint, including both the production and the operational energy of ICT devices, as well as the operational energy for the supporting ICT infrastructure. We then compare this contribution to the global 2016-level GHGE. We have found that, if unchecked, ICT GHGE relative contribution could grow from roughly 1–1.6% in 2007 to exceed 14% of the 2016-level worldwide GHGE by 2040, accounting for more than half of the current relative contribution of the whole transportation sector. Our study also highlights the contribution of smart phones and shows that by 2020, the footprint of smart phones alone would surpass the individual contribution of desktops, laptops and displays. Finally, we offer some actionable recommendations on how to mitigate and curb the ICT explosive GHGE footprint, through a combination of renewable energy use, tax policies, managerial actions and alternative business models.

Introduction

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) devices and services have taken a central part in our lives and have fundamentally transformed the way we work, communicate, travel, and play in the last few decades. Indeed, while human population has only doubled in the last 50 years, the global consumption of electronic devices has grown six fold in that same time span (Wann, 2011). According to the cellphone manufacturer Ericsson, 6.1 billion cellphones will be smartphones by 2020 (Reuters, 2020).

The ICT industry has a rather positive image in the eyes of the sustainability community today as it has substantially transformed the way we communicate and work, uncovering opportunities to reduce the human impact on nature. As an example, e-commerce, tele-working, and video conferencing have reduced the worldwide travelling of both people and goods and hence the consumption of petroleum and the emission of greenhouse gases (Yi and Thomas, 2007). Furthermore, wireless sensors and monitoring technology has enabled us to develop the concept of so-called “smart grids”, “smart homes” and “smart buildings” to better optimize energy management in those premises through monitoring of parameters such as temperature, humidity, and sun light (Gharavi and Ghafurian, 2011) (Paetz et al., 2012) (Chwieduk, 2003).

However, this is only one side of the coin to the ICT technology in our lives; the brighter side that is. The darker and more ominous side of the ICT industry is its exponentially growing energy consumption. As our reliance on ICT devices and services grows rapidly, so does our need for energy to manufacture and electricity to power these devices. The generation of this much-needed energy to make and operate all the ICT devices on the market today is a significant contributing cause towards the creation of carbon dioxide, a leading Green House Gas (GHG), as well as other global warming pollutants.

In recent years there has been more awareness around climate change and its potentially devastating effects. There are more climate change initiatives than ever with specific action plans and strategies intended to mitigate the negative effects of global warming on our environment. A chief example of a recent global initiative is the Paris Agreement that took place in December 2015, where 196 nations approved a landmark global plan to curb climate change in the years to come. The agreement placed strong commitments in place to limit global warming to below 2 °C (Stocker, 2014).

Global greenhouse emissions data shows that the major contributors to global emissions by economic sector in 2015 were electricity production (29%), transportation (27%), industry (21%), followed by commercial and residential (12%) and agriculture (9%) (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2016). Based on these numbers alone, one might think that the ICT industry is not a contributing factor towards the global emissions of greenhouse gases. However, a closer look reveals that the energy consumption of computers, data centers, networking equipment, and other ICT devices (excluding smart phones) amounted to as much as 8% of total worldwide consumption, and is projected to reach 14% by 2020 (Pickavet et al., 2008a). What is even more surprising is the fact that these numbers and projections don't include the manufacturing contribution (Williams, 2004a), especially in light of the fact that ICT devices have a much shorter useful life (2–5 years) than any other piece of hardware. If we are to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and mitigate the effects of climate change, it is imperative that we pay close attention to the rapid growth of ICT devices and their associated carbon footprint relative to that of the other economic sectors.

The increase in volume of ICT equipment has an associated increase in carbon footprint on our environment. However, there is spotty record in the literature of the global ICT carbon footprint as its environmental impact comes in different forms and from multiple sources. The emissions from the ICT devices and therefore their environmental impact come from energy consumption used both, in manufacturing these devices, as well as running them. In addition, mining for earth metals used in manufacturing of ICT devices and waste disposal are additional contributors to the total ICT industry CO2 footprint. As such, there are several different methodologies that can be used to calculate the CO2 footprint depending on which aspects are taken into account.

With our ever-growing demand for ICT devices and the pressing matter of carbon emissions reduction, it is critical that (i) we fully and precisely assess the contribution of ICT to the global GHG emissions both today and in the future, and (ii) explore innovative solutions in the ICT industry that can meet our growing demand without undermining our reductions targets for CO2 emissions.

Section snippets

Previous work

Quite surprisingly, while there have been many studies of the electricity consumption of ICT devices and infrastructure, ranging in scope from a single device or a single region to a broader scope, there is a relative dearth of peer-reviewed articles on the total carbon footprint impact of the overall ICT industry. Some of the early estimations of the global CO2 emissions and energy use (Gartner, 2007) (Webb, 2008) were based on rough, unspecified and obsolete data, and lacked the necessary

Research methods

The ICT industry is composed mainly of two categories of electronic equipment; namely (i) the electronic devices, such as PC's including desktops and laptops, along with the associated CRT and LCD displays, and handheld devices such as tablets and smart phones, and (ii) the infrastructural facilities such as data centers, comprising servers, networking gear, power and cooling equipment and communication networks, comprising customer premises access equipment (CPAE), office networks, and telecom

Data collection

In order to estimate the overall GHGE footprint of the devices and equipment within our study's scope, we will need to collect a significant amount of key data about each of the main devices in order to estimate the annual lifecycle footprint for each device, as well as its corresponding global number of units in use over enough years to yield a reliable projection over time. More specifically, we need to collect the following key metrics for each of the consumer devices: (i) the production

Results

We're now finally in a position to aggregate all the data collected so far and estimate the global annual GHGE footprint of the ICT industry. In Fig. 5 below, we show the ICT global GHGE footprint relative to the total global footprint on the primary axis, and in absolute values (in units of Mtsingle bondCO2-e) on the secondary axis. Note that the projected data represents the aggregation of the projected data for each of the ICT components, and not based on any fit of the actual data. Note also that the

Discussion & limitations

The above analysis of the growing impact of ICT industry on the global carbon footprint takes into precise and methodical account the impact of the production footprint in addition to the energy consumption of the ICT devices. It also accounts and highlights for the first time the contribution of smart phones to the overall impact. While most of the reviewed literature has focused on the impact of personal computers, and mostly desktops, we found that by 2020, the contribution of PC's

Conclusion

We have conducted in this study what we believe to be the most detailed, precise and methodical analysis of the ICT global GHGE footprint, which includes both the production and the operational energy of ICT devices, as well as the operational energy for the supporting ICT infrastructure. We have found that the ICT GHGE contribution relative to worldwide footprint will roughly double from 1 to 1.6% in 2007 to 3–3.6% by 2020. Assuming a continued annual relative growth ranging from 5.6 to 6.9%,

Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Mo Elbestawi for his ongoing support of this research as well as McMaster University for the research grant No. 5-55050 without which this paper would not have been possible. We also sincerely thank the reviewers of this manuscript for their in-depth review and constructive feedback that greatly improved the quality of this contribution to this complex and fast moving field.

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