Why
Why it matters
Sustainable practices aid in changing society for the better. Following a sustainable lifestyle will reduce your carbon footprint and the number of contaminants discharged into the environment, thus enhancing its safety. The entire globe gains from a sustainability focus and gets to live in more hygienic, healthier settings.
When the environmental impact is considered over the long term, we realize that a laptop can generate up to 88 kg of carbon per year with just 8 hours of daily use. The additional demand puts a strain on our planet as each new laptop produced results in 316 kg of carbon emissions, 190,000 liters of water use, and 1.2 tonnes of material extraction.
Industry experts and corporate purchasers alike are beginning to see the possibility of prolonging the usable life of equipment, particularly for computing equipment.
Even if AI has a lot of potential to be at the forefront of climate action and help combat climate change, it also has its carbon footprint. According to research, training an AI language processing system generated 1,400 pounds of carbon-equivalent emissions, which is about the same as flying one passenger from New York to San Francisco once. It should be mentioned that natural language processing (NLP) models are not the most ecologically friendly AI models, despite being among the biggest (given their goal of learning the human language).
The resources of the planet are limited. The rate at which the world's natural resources are being used has been dangerously high since the year 2000. The global material footprint increased by 70% from 54 billion tonnes in 2000 to 92 billion tonnes in 2017. IT is today's most widely utilized piece of office equipment and is significantly affecting the sustainability of our world. The prevalence of home work has increased the demand for laptops and other portable IT devices significantly.
Due to the pandemic, remote learning has also grown in popularity, along with home working, which has led to an increase in the demand for IT equipment from businesses and educational institutions. Enterprise IT's carbon footprint will increase as long as businesses continue to invest in digital technologies. Organizations, however, do not consider this to be a cause for concern. Without carbon offsets, 78% of companies intend to cut their carbon footprint by less than one-fourth over the next three years.
Too much e-waste is sent to South America, Africa, China, and India despite rules that are supposed to prevent this, and too much of it ends up in landfills.
Local e-waste "pickers" (often youngsters) in underdeveloped nations are exposed to dangerous poisons on e-waste sites, which can sometimes result in death, while the long-term effects on local communities and the environment are yet unknown.
How IT affects resources
Nobody seriously contests that human activity is to blame for global warming. Information technology also consumes a lot of energy. According to Gartner, computers' power usage is responsible for 2% of the world's carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. That is almost equivalent to the carbon output of the aviation sector.
The enormous carbon footprint of the IT industry is increased by the enormous number of resources that are consumed in the production of just one new laptop. One laptop generates an average of 316 kg of CO2 emissions during the mining, production, and manufacturing processes, which contribute to global warming. We can completely reduce undesired emissions by using already-existing computers.
A single laptop requires about 190,000 litres of water, which is a significant amount throughout the mining and production processes for generating technology. For the average American, this is more than 700 years' worth of drinking water.
Each component of a laptop requires the production of 1,200 kg of the Earth's resources, which are mined and used. Remanufacturing stops the use of additional resources as well as the creation of e-waste from the disposal of laptops.
We're all aware of how IT influences resources to some extent. Desktops, laptops, and servers are constantly powered in the office. But these gadgets don't simply use up resources; they also produce a sizable amount of greenhouse gas emissions. This is especially true while a device is being developed at the beginning of its existence. In actuality, the building stage consumes 81% of the energy a computer needs over its lifespan.
Even though academics are working to develop more accurate methods to calculate this, it can be challenging to estimate how much CO2 each company's computers produce. According to Howard Rubin, a research associate at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research, the IT operations of sectors with high processing demands, like telecommunications and financial services, produce more CO2 per $1 million in revenue than those of other sectors.
However, once the equipment is installed in your office, it continues to use energy. The majority of gadgets, especially servers, produce heat, so cooling down computing equipment frequently necessitates the use of additional energy.