Introduction
If someone were to ask you what the ingredients are in a meal or snack you were eating, you would be able to find the information. It may take a few minutes of finding the packaging or tracking down the nutritional information online, but ultimately, you would be able to find it. This also holds true for clothes and beauty products, but what about the other things that we use everyday, such as technology? Knowing the “ingredients” of the things that we consume is fundamental to being a conscious consumer. However, if we remain ignorant to the raw materials and components that are used to build our devices, the resulting footprint including Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions from both the manufacturing process and usage, we are doing a huge disservice to the planet and the people being exploited for the sake of technological advancement.
Overview: Calculating Resource Costs
I have to admit that while I consider myself to have a relatively high level of energy literacy, thinking about the concept of “educational sustainability” was new to me. Like many people, I have often just assumed that the more that we conduct things online or “paper-free” the better it is for the environment. I am now realizing that digital does not automatically mean that it is “good” for the environment, and that even in the digital world there are certain practices that are more environmentally friendly than others. For example, did you know that transferring and storing one gigabyte in the cloud consumes one million times more energy than if you simply saved it to a hard drive? (Adamson, 2017). Examining technology in regards to sustainability is quite fascinating, but also alarming. It is also quite difficult to find reliable sources to really draw reliable measurements of the energy and environmental footprint related to using technology in a particular context.
As a graduate student, I am used to relying upon peer-reviewed and reliable articles when completing an assignment. However, for the purpose of this assignment, I was quite determined to uncover as much information as I possibly could to document and measure the environmental footprint of my job. It was not easy to find this information, and I had to be satisfied with using a mix of sources that I could find online to piece what I needed together. I am employed as a Community Development Facilitator, and while my job is quite diverse, I do predominantly spend 7 hours per day using a computer. This mainly involves attending virtual meetings, designing presentations, writing reports or emails, and planning upcoming workshops or training sessions. Therefore, I decided that I wanted to use this assignment to determine my own environmental footprint related to my job, and determine the following:
- What materials were used to build my laptop computer;
- How much water was used in the laptop manufacturing process, and how much CO2 emissions were generated;
- How much CO2 emissions does using a laptop for 7 hours per day generate;
- What is the footprint of internet searches, sending approximately 10-15 emails, and storing documents in the cloud;
- What is the footprint of attending 1 hour of a Teams or Zoom meeting.
A Recipe for a Laptop Computer
Even though I had recently watched a TEDx Talks (2020) video where geologist Arjan Dijkstra implores people to recycle their devices due to the rare metals that are mined for their components, I still felt quite shocked to see the list of all of the metals that are mined to build a laptop. According to Crawford (2021), the devastation that mining leaves in its wake is often overlooked in the name of technological progress. However, not only can mining have devastating environmental consequences, but it often involves human rights violations, as is the case with Cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Democratic Republic of Congo produces 75% of the world’s Cobalt, but the mining has resulted in violence, the spread of diseases like Ebola, child labour, and fatal accidents (Campbell, 2020).
Thus, I felt compelled to create my infographic “Recipe for a Laptop Computer” to include the main information that I could find about the footprint involved in manufacturing one laptop. It is largely based on an infographic and article from Circular Computing(2019) and a Battery University (2016). In addition to the raw materials that are used to build components for the computer, Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) is used to create the plastic housing and like most plastics. It contains hydrocarbons derived from oil and gas drilling which also leaves a significant footprint on the environment (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene, 2022).
My Energy Footprint
The laptop is the main tool of my trade, and while it became clear that the manufacturing process of a laptop is responsible for the bulk of its energy footprint, the large data centers and servers required to power the cloud use a lot of energy (Circular Computing, 2021). Thus, I still wanted to look beyond the laptop itself at the footprint involved in my typical day of using the laptop for seven hours, searching the internet, storing files in the cloud, emailing, and video conferencing. Circular Computing (2021) has calculated that based on the average energy use of a laptop used for 8 hours per day, over the span of 4 years, it will result in 61.5 kgCO2eq. For my use, this would be approximately 0.04 kgCO2eq per day .
However, this does not include the indirect use for the cloud storage, emails, or video conferencing. On average, I probably send approximately ten emails per day, which according to Climatecare (2021) at 4 grams of CO2 per email equals 40 grams (0.04 kg) of CO2 per day for my purposes. Additionally, conducting approximately 20 Google searches at 0.2 grams per search (Climatecare, 2021) equates to 4 grams (0.004 kg); Zoom equals approx. 160g CO2e/hr (0.16 kg CO2e/hr) (Travers, 2021). Finally, determining the CO2 emissions from using the cloud to store files is simply an estimate based on approximations, but according to Adamson (2017) saving and storing 100 gigabytes of data in the cloud per year results in approximately 0.2 tons of CO2. Assuming I store this average amount, my calculations based on a five day work week result in my personal cloud storage emissions being 0.76kg of CO2 per day. Together, this adds up to 1.00 kg of CO2 emissions per day. The results can be viewed in Table 1 below.
Table 1: Daily CO2 Emissions
To put this all into perspective, assuming I work 250 days per year, the technology I use at work alone results in approximately 250 kg of CO2 emissions per year. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s “Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator” (2022) this is the equivalent of driving one gas powered car 621 miles (or 999 km), and the amount of trees required to sequester this CO2 would be 0.296 acres (0.12 hectares) of forest. This is not inconsequential considering that I am just one individual, using one laptop for seven hours per day/five days per week.
Conclusion
I really enjoyed this activity, but I was a bit surprised by how much work went into trying to track down numbers and information. Everything really ended up being an estimate and pieced together. I am sure that I am also missing information, but ultimately, just the exercise of thinking about my carbon footprint at work has me thinking about areas that I can improve on. For example, saving more to my hard drive or an external thumb drive and reserving the cloud mainly for final copies of important documents. Realizing the social and environmental cost of one laptop has reinforced the importance of maintaining and upgrading existing devices whenever possible to avoid unnecessary replacements, recycling when they are at the end of their life, and looking at more sustainable replacements when the time comes to replace my laptop including considering refurbished. Making more sustainable choices takes knowledge and it is important for everyone to know the ways that our technology use and habits are negatively impacting people and the planet if we ever hope to bring about change.
References
Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene. (2022, April 9). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Acrylonitrile_butadiene_styrene&oldid=1077205571
Adamson, J. (2017, May 15). Carbon and the cloud. Stanford Magazine. https://medium.com/stanford-magazine/carbon-and-the-cloud-d6f481b79dfe
Battery University. (2016, July 5). Is lithium-ion the ideal battery? https://batteryuniversity.com/article/is-lithium-ion-the-ideal-battery#:~:text=For%20a%20lithium%2Dion%20cell,adds%20up%20to%204.8g
Campbell, J. (2020, October 29). Why cobalt mining in the DRC needs urgent attention. Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/blog/why-cobalt-mining-drc-needs-urgent-attention
Circular Computing. (2019, October 16). Raw materials in a laptop. https://circularcomputing.com/news/carbon-footprint-laptop/#:~:text=The%20average%20estimated%20carbon%20footprint,and%20how%20often%20it’s%20used.
Circular Computing. (2021, August 9). What is the carbon footprint of a laptop? https://circularcomputing.com/news/carbon-footprint-laptop/#:~:text=The%20average%20estimated%20carbon%20footprint,and%20how%20often%20it’s%20used.
Climatecare. (2021, April 22). Infographic: The carbon footprint of the internet. https://www.climatecare.org/resources/news/infographic-carbon-footprint-internet/
Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI. Yale University Press.
Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator. (2022, March). United States Environmental Protection Agency. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gas-equivalencies-calculator
TedX Talks. (2020, June 1). The elements of the energy transition | Arjan Dijkstra | TedXTwenteU. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKo8DlbWEP0
Travers, K. (2021, March 4). How to reduce the environmental impact of your next virtual meeting. MIT News. https://news.mit.edu/2021/how-to-reduce-environmental-impact-next-virtual-meeting-0304