ecologies

This page considers the ecological impact of the internet and the 'information economy', exploring claims that digital is necessarily greener and cleaner.

It covers -

• introduction - questions about ideologies, expectations and uncertainties in exploring the environmental impact of the net
• dematerialisation and the glass pipeline - does virtuality and disintermediation involve a reduction in energy and material use
• mobility and clustering - digital nomads, congestion pricing, dot-com clustering and other geospatial issues
• waste - packaging, consumption and 'e-waste' and other technotrash
• displacement - offshoring pollution along with production?
• studies - major works on the internet, digital economy and environment

     introduction

For enthusiasts one reason for the 'newness' of the 'new economy' is that it is supposedly cleaner and greener than superseded smokestack or rustbelt economies, with greater uptake of digital technologies being associated with a significantly reduced impact on local and global ecologies in the short and long terms.

The vision is one of the machine in the garden, far far from the madding crowds, toxic waste dumps or ugly smokestacks - a post-industrial collage of Bambi meets the iPod, telework and responsible consumption by enlightened consumers.

Some have expressed alarm about the energy requirements of the digital economy or insidious (because invisible) ecological damage. Others have more prosaically claimed that developed economies are "drowning in plastic" and - having run out of landfill for burial of obsolete personal computers, fridges and other junk - are being "forced" to offshore waste disposal in a grim echo of offshoring jobs.

Alas, the evidence for many claims is problematical.

There is considerable uncertainty about the local/global environmental impact of the net, with benefits apparently often being offset by disadvantages and the significance of particular problems being overstated by some champions. Particular statistics, including some that are recurrently featured in studies by government and advocacy groups, sometimes confuse substances used in manufacturing processes rather than incorporated in each shipped item and generally do not include comparisons with past practice.

     dematerialisation and the glass pipeline

Internet pundits and digital economy cheerleaders such as NOIE have often claimed that 'dematerialisation' of the economy will result in substantial energy and commodity savings.

Those claims encompass major reductions in -

• paper production (and associated transport and storage savings) through adoption of the paperless office
• paper used for newsprint and junkmail, with consumers presumed to rely on electronic media.

An example is the 1997 statement that -

By 2003, e-materialization of paper alone holds the prospect of cutting energy consumption by about 0.25% of total industrial energy use and net [greenhouse gas] GHG emissions by a similar percentage. By 2008, the reductions are likely to be more than twice as great. We also believe the Internet Economy could render unnecessary as much as 3 billion square feet of buildings - some 5% of U.S. commercial floor space - which would likely save a considerable amount of construction-related energy. By 2010, e-materialization of paper, construction, and other activities could reduce U.S. industrial energy and GHG emissions by more than 1.5%.

A 2005 study by Ralph Gay, Robert Davis, Don Phillips & Daniel Sui on Modeling Paradigm for the Environmental Impacts of the Digital Economy more ambitiously suggested

40% to 50% reduction in life cycle energy and pollutant expenditures with e-commerce in the personal computer industry

although it is unlikely that B2B gains in that industry will - or can - be replicated in other sectors.

Forecasts of the paperless office have been debunked in works such as The Myth of the Paperless Office (Cambridge: MIT Press 2001) by Abigail Sellen & Richard Harper which note that paper use has substantially increased, partly because ready access to textprocessing software and printers has encouraged iterative production of drafts - a luxury in the era of handwriting and manual typewriters - and the proliferation of reports, memoranda and letters.

More persuasive case has been made for savings through 'just in time' production, with manufacturers leveraging the 'glass pipeline' to reduce inter-firm and intra-firm waste in material and transport costs. Claims in reports such as Virtual dematerialisation: ebusiness and factor X (PDF) have however been disputed, with critics noting that mooted savings often are not achived in practice or suggesting that customisation encourages "frivolous" production

     mobility and clustering

Futurists have similarly forecast major savings regarding -

• public transport infrastructure, particularly in cities, as consumers will identify and purchase goods electronically rather than travelling to retail premises
• damage to the ozone layer and the construction of hotels, with people relying on electronic communications rather than travelling by air for face to face contact
• the need for office accommodation - indeed in cities (which as noted earlier in this guide are an apparent bugaboo of futurists such as George Gilder) - because people will efficiently telecommute from an unspoiled rural location rather than crowding into a tower in a central business district.

Such claims appeared naive when first articulated and have not improved over time.

Telecommuting, for example, has not eliminated the office; it has instead meant that some workers are 'on call' at all times. Connectivity appears to have resulted in increased rather than decreased travel: face to face remains important.

Etailing appears to have displaced rather than reduced logistics, as the commodity still has to get to the consumer. It may indeed be more environmentally friendly to visit a retailer and put the woolly jumper under your arm rather than receive it - and the packaging - from an etailer via a delivery service.

     waste

There is similar controversy about the extent and treatment of waste, whether that is 'technotrash' such as superseded personal computers, mobile phones and microwave ovens or more traditional junk such as discarded packaging, furniture, industrial equipment and even disposable nappies.

Elsewhere we have noted claims that the average amount of Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment (WEEE) disposed of by a single EU consumer of over a lifetime is 3 tonnes, with the UK for example disposing of over 1 million tonnes of computer monitors, servers, personal computers and mobile phones (along with 500,000 television sets and 3 million refrigerators) every year. US group Computer TakeBack indicated that

315 to 600 million desktop and laptop computers in the U.S. will soon be obsolete ... One report estimates that a pile of these obsolete computers would reach a mile high and cover six acres

a somewhat smaller area than the discarded phone books.

Some of the more alarmist calls for action include -

More than 250 million computers in the United States may become obsolete in the next five years, and those machines, along with televisions, VCRs and cell phones, are flooding the nation's landfills. As a result, substances such as lead, mercury, chromium and cadmium are seeping into the environment

and

Electronic equipment may contain lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium and flame-retardants. These materials can be hazardous if improperly managed at end-of-life. A typical desktop computer monitor contains approximately two kilograms of lead. [That claim is difficult to believe unless the device is shielded like a nuclear reactor]

and

The lack of environmentally sound computer recycling operations has led to e-waste being responsible for 70% of all heavy metals found in U.S. landfills today.  ... Since our recycling programs cannot handle the vast amounts of waste, up to 80% of the e-waste is actually exported to Asia, where it ends up in riverbeds or is illegally and improperly disposed

The Swiss federal government's e-Waste Guide site more sensibly notes that

The formation or discharge of hazardous emissions during the recycling of electrical and electronic equipment depends highly on the handling of electronic waste. Hence hazardous substances contained in computers and televisions don't lead automatically to a risk for the environment and the human health. Some recycling processes (as cable burning) applied in transition and developing countries can cause serious health problems and contaminate air, water and soil.

Although the annual volume of garbage has increased over the past 50 years that is consistent with population growth (with the number of people in the US and Australia doubling since the early 1930s and tripling since the 1890s.

Per capita domestic waste has not shown a marked increase over the past half century. Growth in domestic and industrial waste - of the technotrash variety or otherwise - has arguably been offset by reductions in other waste, with claims for example that at the turn of last century the average US consumer was responsible for around 1200 pounds of coal ash and 20 pounds of manure per year.

A perspective on claims about the prevalence of e-waste in domestic landfill is provided in Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage (Tucson: Uni of Arizona Press 2001) by William Rathje & Cullen Murphy, suggesting that paper accounts for around 40% of volume in domestic landfill. Newspapers supposedly accounting for 13% of the total volume of US domestic fill, with a year's New York Times occupying the space of 18,660 crushed aluminum cans.

The energy requirements for producing and distributing the Times (turning trees into paper, getting ink onto the dried treeflakes and getting the resultant publication into the hands of the consumer) versus the cans or devices for online publications are unclear.

Other observers have fretted about the impact of economic growth. Lester Brown for example argued in 2006 that

China has now overtaken America as the world's leading resource consumer. Among the basic commodities - grain and meat in the food sector, oil and coal in the energy sector, and steel in the industrial sector - China now consumes more of each of these than the US except for oil. It consumes nearly twice as much meat - 67m tonnes compared with 39m tonnes in the US; and more than twice as much steel - 258m tonnes to 104m. The important questions now are: what if China's consumption per person of these resources reaches the current US level, and how long will it take for China's income per person to reach the US level?

If China's economy expands at 8% a year in the decades ahead, its income per person will reach the current US level in 2031. If at that point China's resource consumption per person were the same as that in the US today, its 1.45 billion people would consume the equivalent of two-thirds of the current world grain harvest. China's paper consumption would be double the world's current production. Say goodbye to the world's forests. If China were to have three cars for every four people - as in the US - it would have 1.1bn cars. Worldwide today there are 800m cars. To provide the roads and parking spaces to accommodate such a vast fleet, China would have to pave an area comparable to the land it now plants in rice - 29m hectares (72m acres). It would use 99m barrels of oil a day; the world currently produces only 84m barrels daily, and may never produce much more.

He concludes

The western economic model - the fossil fuel-based, car-centred, throwaway economy - is not going to work for China. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India.

Neither nation, of course, appears to be listening.

     displacement

Hyperbole about the likelihood of e-waste leaching into the water supply or ending up in the food chain has resulted in offshoring of waste disposal along with manufacturing.

The Basel Action Network commented in 2005 that

Too often, justifications of 'building bridges over the digital divide' are used as excuses to obscure and ignore the fact that these bridges double as toxic waste pipelines.

In Australia the 2006 Advancing Australia report estimated that 1.6 million personal computers were disposed of in landfill, a further 1.8 million were added to storage (in addition to 5.3 million held in garages, sheds and other storage areas) and 0.5 million were recycled. In the US it is claimed that around 15% of obsolete personal computers arrive in local landfills, with a further 10% going to community organisations for reuse or to secondary markets for salvage or resale. Reuse is inhibited by hardware limitations (the average consumer cannot do much with a 1980s diskette) or software incompatibility. Supposedly 75% of PCs, printers and other e-devices just "sits around" in garages or other storage; it is likely that there is much surreptitious dumping - in breach of local/national ordinances such as the US Resource Conservation & Recovery Act.

Such legislation, which often makes manufacturers or distributors responsible for end-of-life disposal of devices, has encouraged shipment of equipment to locations where -

• low labour costs and OH&S standards enable components to be salvaged (eg circuit boards can be melted down to recover metals, cables can be stripped to recover the copper wire, PC cases can be chipped to recover plastics)
• governments either encourage burial of foreign hardware (eg heavy equipment with PCB or asbestos) or turn a blind eye to its illicit disposal

The UK Environment Agency suggested in 2004 that some 23,000 tonnes of ICT hardware had gone offshore illegally, typically to jurisdictions such as China, west Africa, Pakistan and India.

Concerns about exports of technotrash are highlighted in the Basel Action Group's 2002 Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia (PDF), Eric Williams' 2005 International activities on E-waste and guidelines for future work (PDF), Robert Bortner's Asia Near East (ANE) Computer Recycling and Disposal (E-Waste) paper (doc) and the 2005 Greenpeace International report (PDF) Resources regarding shipbreaking are highlighted here.

The latter claimed river sediment, soil and ground water samples around the southern Chinese city of Guiyu and New Delhi contained what the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition described as "really scary" levels of contamination attributable to e-waste, including elevated levels of lead, cadmium, antimony and other heavy metals used in electronics, along with polybrominated diphenyl ethers and polychlorinated biphenyls.

Tighter restrictions on making e-trash disappear by shipping it over the ocean have arguably underpinned initiatives such as Close the Gap that involve businesses donating used IT gear to the Third World, something that looks good in corporate promo and addresses EU concerns about dumping junk at home.

     Studies

'Big picture' perspectives are provided by Bjorn Lomborg's controversial The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2001), Bjrn-Ola Linnr's The Return of Malthus: Environmentalism and Post-War Population-Resource Crises (Isle of Harris: White Horse Press 2003), Global Crisis, Global Solutions (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2004), Giles Slade's Made to Break: Technology & Obsolescence in America (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 2006) and Jeremy Leggett's The Carbon War: Dispatches from the End of the Oil Era (London: Allen Lane 1999).

Attempts at identifying the ecological impact of the net arecontentious, given the muddiness of much data, disagreement about basic definitions and questions about extrapolation.

Two examples are the 2001 OECD paper by H. Scott Matthews & Chris Hendrickson on Economic & Environmental Implications of Online Retailing in the United States (PDF), Klaus Fichter's 2001 paper for the German federal environment ministry on Environmental Effects of E-Business and Internet Economy: First Insights & Environment-political Conclusions (PDF).

eWaste and other waste disposal features in Richard Girling's rather grumpy Rubbish! A Chronicle of Waste (London: Transworld 2005), Elizabeth Royte's polemical Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash (Boston: Little Brown 2005), Elizabeth Grossman's High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics & Human Health (Washington: Island Press 2006), John Scanlan's On Garbage (London: Reaktion 2005) and Heather Rogers' Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage (New York: The New Press 2007).

For anti-consumption tracts see Affluenza (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin 2005) and Growth Fetish (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin 2003) by Clive Hamilton & Richard Denniss, their 2005 Wasteful Consumption in Australia (PDF) with David Baker, or Joel Kovel's The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (London: Zed Books 2002). Other dystopian visions are highlighted here. The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China's Future (Ithaca: Cornell Uni Press 2004) by Elizabeth Economy is persuasive, although notions of Chinese exceptionalism might be tempered through consultation of Mark Elvin's superb The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 2004).

Works on environmental politics (or the professionalisation of environmental lobbying) include Samuel Hays' A History of Environmental Politics since 1945 (Pittsburgh: Uni of Pittsburgh Press 2000), Drew Hutton & Libby Connors' A History of the Australian Environment Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1999), Christopher Bosso's Environment, Inc: From Grassroots to Beltway (Lawrence: Uni Press of Kansas, 2005), Martin Mulligan & Stuart Hill's Ecological Pioneers: A Social History of Australian Ecological Thought and Action (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2002), Adam Rome's The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2001), Paul Sutter's Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: Uni of Washington Press 2002) and Robert Gottlieb's Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington: Island Press 2005).






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