Su Bin Yoon, Class of 2021
I have 5,789 unopened emails sitting in my inbox that I probably will never read, ever. There are updated privacy policies from PayPal, promotions from Sephora, and links to TED Talk videos I promised myself I would watch later. When we think about the interweb, we generally think of an abstract cloud of information floating in the air like Iron Man’s AI secretary or the raining screen of green numbers from The Matrix. Because I had the same impression of the internet, I switched from using paper notes and printouts to using an iPad and iCloud to be more environmentally friendly. I glossed over the unspoken truth about the internet and all its marvelous cloud storage: it has a form in the physical realm. It exists on this plane like a car with grey emissions and the Great Pacific garbage patch. I give you E-pollution, the most elusive form of pollution that may soon become the next biggest threat to our climate.
For convenience, I will define E-pollution as all pollution due to any electronic activities from simply browsing the internet to upgrading your phone and discarding the old one. Even after reading about E-pollution, I worried more about plastic bottles than my brand-new smartphone. People rarely think or worry about perhaps the most contemporary form of pollution. At least, I patted myself on the back when I clicked on “Go Paperless” notifications with a little green leaf next to it, telling me to receive receipts, bills, and notes electronically. These imply that going electronic is a solution rather than part of the climate change problem. Although I would love to believe that I am “saving the planet” by not writing my notes on paper, I realized that the virtual lifestyle is not so green after all.
First thing in the morning, I grab my phone to check the notifications – the closest physical link to the all-powerful internet – an end-user equipment. Even though I live surrounded by electronics, I could not believe that an average household in America has access to more than eleven devices in 2019 (Smith & Holman, 2019). Then, I looked around my house: three smartphones, three laptops, two televisions, two iPads, a landline phone, and other long-forgotten devices. Although I actively use only two to three devices, I can access at least eleven devices at home. In 2016 alone, we threw away about 49 million tons of E-waste (Cho, 2018). That is not including my old phone sleeping in the back of a drawer in case I crack my new phone again. In 2021, this number may grow to more than 57 million tons, roughly equivalent to the weight of 5,700 Eiffel towers (Cho, 2018).
I am not sure about Eiffel towers, but I sure hope that my thousand-dollar phone has precious metal parts that can be upcycled, recycled, reused, or something! Indeed, circuit boards can contain up to 800 times the amount of gold and up to 40 times the amount of copper than the same weight of ore mined in the United States (Cho, 2018). From the 49 million tons of E-waste thrown away in 2016, the estimated value of recoverable materials is $64.6 billion. However, only about 20 percent of the total E-waste made it through the recovery and recycling process (Cho, 2018).
Before anyone goes junkyard diving for circuit boards, I should warn that these electronics also contain toxic materials like lead and mercury that are difficult to dispose of safely. These lead and mercury sitting in the landfill can leak into the water supply and contaminate it (Cho, 2018). Incinerating E-waste is also dangerous since it contains PVC plastic and other materials that produce carcinogens. To go around this problem, many nations export their waste to other countries (Cho, 2018; John Vidal, 2013). These exports are often to less developed countries without proper facilities nor regulations to deal with the toxic substances from the wreckage (Lundgren et al., 2012). During manual disassembly of E-waste for its valuable parts, workers are exposed to cadmium, mercury, arsenic, lithium, and other hazards. The workers report high incidences of congenital disabilities, lung cancer, immune defects, and other conditions (Lundgren et al., 2012). The inhalation of dust, dermal contact, and possible implosion of the devices increase the danger to the workers and the local environment.
The effect of E-pollution does not stop in the local environment. In the end, E-pollution returns to harm everyone once it enters the ecosystem. These pollutants can travel to remote areas beyond their local environment, which points to a risk of long-range transport and exposure to those far away from the origin – meaning, those who export the toxic waste abroad are not necessarily free from the impact of E-waste (Lundgren et al., 2012). Regardless of the magnitude of such secondary exposure, E-pollution can also contaminate the food chain and undergo bioaccumulation and magnification within live organisms that we consume. It can contaminate our ocean, our land, and even the sky upon entering the water system. Not only for the interest of money but also our health, proper disposal and recycling of E-waste are essential to reducing overall E-pollution.
I hope E-pollution is no longer an imaginary boogeyman by now. If not, there are still the other two components of the internet left to send up a red flag. The data centers are really just giant storage space for all the data on the internet (Pearce, 2018). This includes the family photos from summer vacation backed up on the cloud, the Call of Duty accounts, and the Amazon Fresh website. As a bedroom recluse, I have issues with my devices heating up from time to time, usually when I run an application that demands a lot of data. Data centers face the same problems, except they cannot afford to turn the machines off and back on or put them in rice (Pearce, 2018). If one of the major data centers was to go down, it would face lawsuits and compensations from its clients. When Google’s services were down for an hour in December 2020, the world crashed into chaos (Goldman, 2020). Many people, including myself, rely on Google to conduct daily tasks like studying, sending emails, watching YouTube videos, etc. Google had to compensate its premium users for the outage even though it was only for an hour (Goldman, 2020).
Maybe Google going down does not seem like a disaster, but Google is not the only service using data centers. There are banks, hospitals, the military, and other essential institutions that require a reliable internet and cloud service. The mighty Google took an hour to fix a server error, likely from a data center issue. I can understand why the industry wants to avoid an outage altogether, consequently turning data centers into colossal energy hogs. Companies not only want to prevent a system failure but to perform at maximum capacities at all times (Pearce, 2018). I am guilty of getting mad at a page taking longer than 3 seconds to load as well. The result is carbon emissions from the internet that match the emissions from all global airline activities combined (Cook et al., 2017).
To handle the heat from the restless machines, data centers use excess coolants and other systems to keep them from literally melting down. I imagine Silicon Valley as a tech haven, free of crude air pollution like diesel. However, the California state government’s Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory lists many Silicon Valley data centers as one of the top diesel polluters in the area (Glanz, 2012). Diesel is classified as a carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer under the World Health Organization (Tracy Wyant et al., 2015). Current literature primarily attributes diesel exhaust to an increased risk of lung cancer, but ultrafine particles (diameter <0.05–0.10 μm) emitted as a part of the diesel exhaust were reported to be capable of entering the bloodstream after penetrating the epithelium and the vascular walls (Sydbom et al., 2001). This suggests systematic consequences beyond lung cancer throughout various parts of our anatomy (Sydbom et al., 2001; Tracy Wyant et al., 2015). Despite these hazards, one can easily spot a windowless box of a data center even in crowded cities such as Downtown Los Angeles, consuming an enormous amount of energy, producing carbon emissions, and pumping out toxic exhausts.
Access networks put the finishing “Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo” touch to the magic of the internet by connecting end-user equipment and data centers. I rarely think about the physical wires and antennas around that let me use Instagram. The ugly overhead telephone lines, powerlines, internet cables, and even the satellites outside our stratosphere let us enjoy the wireless lifestyle.
To be honest, I was counting on the eccentric tech billionaire Elon Musk and other scientists to find us a new planet to inhabit if all else fails. Netflix recently premiered the movie Space Sweepers, a story of 2092 when the Earth is nearly inhabitable. The protagonists risk their lives collecting space debris and trading them for money to survive. This movie could be our future – at least in terms of space sweeping. The first satellite to orbit the Earth was Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Not even 70 years later, we have 2,000 active satellites and 3,000 dead satellites up there (O’Callaghan, 2021). Although we can pull back some of the large debris into the atmosphere for them to burn up, we can do nothing for the smaller debris piling up in space. These heaps of junk pose a threat to other satellites and space exploration (O’Callaghan, 2021). This is not a story of 2092 like in Space Sweepers. In October 2020, two pieces of debris almost collided, which would have created clouds of small debris that would jeopardize our satellites and spacecraft for centuries before falling back to the Earth’s atmosphere (Falk, 2020).
E-pollution deserves some of our “eco-guilt” to avoid the apocalyptic situation described in Space Sweepers. It is more relevant than ever due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has forced a paradigm shift to the virtual environment. I work, learn, volunteer, and attend concerts remotely. With this comes more E-pollution. I know that I am not the only one spending an unhealthy amount of time watching Netflix and YouTube. During the lockdown in March 2020, internet usage increased by 25% in a matter of days (Click, 2020). On average, people were spending almost 7 hours a day online in the third quarter of 2020 (Kemp, 2021). That is approximately half of the waking hours! This rate means that the total internet usage will reach about 12 trillion hours in 2021 alone, which is 1.3 billion years spent online by humanity.
I do not want to leave you with a Doomsday clock without any solutions. There are things we can do as individuals to reduce E-pollution. The first step is realizing that the internet is not invisible nor immaterial. The awareness will lead us to think about our internet habits and act more consciously in our daily lives. There is a distinct E-hoarding behavior that comes with the convenience of having every electronic data ever at our fingertips. We keep emails that would have been spam 20 years ago and the photos we would have burned after high school. We make backups and backups of those backups to ensure that we never lose anything – even the useless documents that just sit on your desktop. If used without a conscious effort to make electronic usage more “green,” the internet is not any better than using pen and paper like the old days – only convenient.
I recently had an email cleanse where I deleted all unnecessary emails and unsubscribed from email lists that I never check. I went through my cloud albums for photos and videos that I no longer want. It also saved me some embarrassment in the future because I did not want some of those photos ever to see the light of day. I stopped playing Netflix in the background when I barely pay attention to it. I turned off the automatic backup on my smartphone and took the time to assign specific folders for cloud synchronization instead. I do not need every screenshot I ever take to be always available in the cloud. The cleanse reduced my recurring carbon emission in a few hours, and I became more organized and aware of personal data. If you are paying for cloud services, you may even benefit financially by downgrading to a cheaper plan after a cleanse.
Although individual action is essential, my impact is only a drop in the ocean. There are larger organizations that can make a bigger splash than my E-cleanse. The other day, I debated whether my family should get an electric car or a classic oil-fueled car. Of course, I favored getting an electric vehicle to reduce our carbon footprint and be free of toxic exhaust. On the other hand, my father argued that an electric vehicle still uses the electricity generated from fossil fuel unless we decide to get our own solar panel. The same issue arises with E-pollution. As long as I use the internet, the industry’s infrastructure determines a large portion of my carbon footprint. If the IT industry were a country, it would be the third-largest contributor to climate change after China and the United States (Cook et al., 2017). Leading by example, Google contracted to purchase all solar power from the biggest solar energy farm in the Netherlands (Pearce, 2018). The solar energy farm supplies the energy required to operate one of its European data centers. Customers should welcome these macro-scale changes in energy production to encourage more companies to follow in Google’s footsteps.
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming introduces solid-state wave energy as a candidate for the future of renewable energy (Hawken, 2017). The water is almost a thousand times denser than the air, making wave energy more efficient than wind turbines in theory. I instantly thought of its applications in data center maintenance and operation. Microsoft recently announced that underwater data centers have the potential to be practical, sustainable, and more reliable, with significantly lower failure rates than their counterparts on land (Roach, 2020). Since these data centers are already installed in a body of water, I believe that wave energy would be the most efficient form of renewable energy to support the system. Microsoft aims to use co-located renewable energy sources to make the data centers sustainable as well (Roach, 2020). Once we can balance the cost of wave technology with the benefits, it would undoubtedly be a great renewable energy source for data centers and beyond.
Besides using more renewable energy, enforcing policies to limit the impact of E-pollution should be an institutional responsibility. Not many countries consider how green the internet is, and there are fewer restrictions on the industry. It is growing fast, while the response to its environmental impact is sluggish at best. Remember the toxic, carcinogen-producing Eiffel towers? The developed countries export the E-waste to less developed parts of the world, such as Southeast Asia, to pollute their environment instead (Cho, 2018; John Vidal, 2013). I understand the capitalist drive behind maximizing revenue and minimizing cost, but how could we preach renewable energy and sustainable growth when we hand off our waste and pollution to less-developed nations? It is not fair for developed nations to restrict developing countries based on environmental pollution when they are responsible for almost 80% of historical carbon emissions (Center for Global Development, 2015). For instance, the U.S. could pass a federal law that prevents E-waste exports and subsidizes companies that recycle them professionally. Internationally, exchanging information on renewable energy to help developing nations establish enough infrastructure to support sustainable growth would be crucial to minimize E-pollution globally. I think it is, for the lack of better words, plain stupid to neglect developing nations for the interest of short-term profits from hoarding technology.
I used to enjoy dystopian futuristic movies that take place on inhabitable Earth. I thought Space Sweepers would be a lighthearted science fiction film that I could enjoy without worrying about how polluting my existence can be. I could not focus on the movie because the premise of the plot felt frighteningly close to home; it was no longer fiction. After knowing the cost of emails, online shopping, and video streaming, I see more chances to save energy and reduce pollution. The best part about the internet is the dynamic nature of the industry. We can change our internet habits to be cleaner and greener for the environment if we can treat E-pollution as a real threat to climate change instead of neglecting it like the pile of unread emails that will never be read.
References
Center for Global Development. (2015, August 18). Developed Countries Are Responsible for 79 Percent of Historical Carbon Emissions. Center For Global Development. https://www.cgdev.org/media/who-caused-climate-change-historically
Chasan, E. (2020, January 26). The environmental cost of keeping mail and files online keeps rising. The Japan Times. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/26/business/tech/email-global-warming/
Cho, R. (2018, August 27). What Can We Do About the Growing E-waste Problem? State of the Planet. https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/08/27/growing-e-waste-problem/
Click, L. R. and S. (2020, August 15). How Covid-19 Changed Americans’ Internet Habits. Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-lockdown-tested-internets-backbone-11597503600
Cook, G., Lee, J., Tsai, T., Kong, A., Deans, J., Johnson, B., Bach, N., & Jardim, E. (2017). CLICKING CLEAN: WHO IS WINNING THE RACE TO BUILD A GREEN INTERNET? Greenpeace Inc. http://www.clickclean.org/international/en/
Falk, D. (2020, October 16). 2 large pieces of space junk nearly collided in “high risk” situation. National Geogrphic.
Glanz, J. (2012, September 23). Power, Pollution and the Internet. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html
Goldman, D. (2020, December 14). Google was hit with massive outage, including YouTube, Gmail and Google Classroom. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/14/tech/google-youtube-gmail-down/index.html
Hawken, P. (Ed.). (2017). Drawdown: The most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming. Penguin Books.
John Vidal. (2013, December 14). Toxic “e-waste” dumped in poor nations, says United Nations. The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/dec/14/toxic-ewaste-illegal-dumping-developing-countries
Kemp, S. (2021, January 27). Digital 2021: Global Overview Report. DataReportal – Global Digital Insights. https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2021-global-overview-report
Lundgren, K., International Labour Office, Programme on Safety and Health at Work and the Environment, International Labour Office, & Sectoral Activities Department. (2012). The global impact of e-waste: Addressing the challenge. ILO.
O’Callaghan, J. (2021). What is space junk and why is it a problem? Natural History Museum. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-space-junk-and-why-is-it-a-problem.html
Pearce, F. (2018, April 3). Energy Hogs: Can World’s Huge Data Centers Be Made More Efficient? Yale Environment 360. https://e360.yale.edu/features/energy-hogs-can-huge-data-centers-be-made-more-efficient
Roach, J. (2020, September 14). Microsoft finds underwater datacenters are reliable, practical and use energy sustainably | Innovation Stories. Microsoft. https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/project-natick-underwater-datacenter/
Smith, C., & Holman, M. (2019, December 4). Deloitte Launches New Survey: Connectivity and Mobile Trends Survey – Press Release. Deloitte United States. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/about-deloitte/articles/press-releases/deloitte-launches-connectivity-mobile-trends-survey.html
Sydbom, A., Blomberg, A., Parnia, S., Stenfors, N., Sandström, T., & Dahlén, S.-E. (2001). Health effects of diesel exhaust emissions. European Respiratory Journal, 17(4), 733–746. https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/17/4/733
Tracy Wyant, Rick Alteri, Mamta Kalidas, Cynthia Ogoro, Barbara Lubejko, Kirsten Eidsmoe, Sandy McDowell, & Beverly Greene. (2015, July 27). Diesel Exhaust and Cancer. American Cancer Society. https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/diesel-exhaust-and-cancer.html
For convenience, I will define E-pollution as all pollution due to any electronic activities from simply browsing the internet to upgrading your phone and discarding the old one. Even after reading about E-pollution, I worried more about plastic bottles than my brand-new smartphone. People rarely think or worry about perhaps the most contemporary form of pollution. At least, I patted myself on the back when I clicked on “Go Paperless” notifications with a little green leaf next to it, telling me to receive receipts, bills, and notes electronically. These imply that going electronic is a solution rather than part of the climate change problem. Although I would love to believe that I am “saving the planet” by not writing my notes on paper, I realized that the virtual lifestyle is not so green after all.
First thing in the morning, I grab my phone to check the notifications – the closest physical link to the all-powerful internet – an end-user equipment. Even though I live surrounded by electronics, I could not believe that an average household in America has access to more than eleven devices in 2019 (Smith & Holman, 2019). Then, I looked around my house: three smartphones, three laptops, two televisions, two iPads, a landline phone, and other long-forgotten devices. Although I actively use only two to three devices, I can access at least eleven devices at home. In 2016 alone, we threw away about 49 million tons of E-waste (Cho, 2018). That is not including my old phone sleeping in the back of a drawer in case I crack my new phone again. In 2021, this number may grow to more than 57 million tons, roughly equivalent to the weight of 5,700 Eiffel towers (Cho, 2018).
I am not sure about Eiffel towers, but I sure hope that my thousand-dollar phone has precious metal parts that can be upcycled, recycled, reused, or something! Indeed, circuit boards can contain up to 800 times the amount of gold and up to 40 times the amount of copper than the same weight of ore mined in the United States (Cho, 2018). From the 49 million tons of E-waste thrown away in 2016, the estimated value of recoverable materials is $64.6 billion. However, only about 20 percent of the total E-waste made it through the recovery and recycling process (Cho, 2018).
Before anyone goes junkyard diving for circuit boards, I should warn that these electronics also contain toxic materials like lead and mercury that are difficult to dispose of safely. These lead and mercury sitting in the landfill can leak into the water supply and contaminate it (Cho, 2018). Incinerating E-waste is also dangerous since it contains PVC plastic and other materials that produce carcinogens. To go around this problem, many nations export their waste to other countries (Cho, 2018; John Vidal, 2013). These exports are often to less developed countries without proper facilities nor regulations to deal with the toxic substances from the wreckage (Lundgren et al., 2012). During manual disassembly of E-waste for its valuable parts, workers are exposed to cadmium, mercury, arsenic, lithium, and other hazards. The workers report high incidences of congenital disabilities, lung cancer, immune defects, and other conditions (Lundgren et al., 2012). The inhalation of dust, dermal contact, and possible implosion of the devices increase the danger to the workers and the local environment.
The effect of E-pollution does not stop in the local environment. In the end, E-pollution returns to harm everyone once it enters the ecosystem. These pollutants can travel to remote areas beyond their local environment, which points to a risk of long-range transport and exposure to those far away from the origin – meaning, those who export the toxic waste abroad are not necessarily free from the impact of E-waste (Lundgren et al., 2012). Regardless of the magnitude of such secondary exposure, E-pollution can also contaminate the food chain and undergo bioaccumulation and magnification within live organisms that we consume. It can contaminate our ocean, our land, and even the sky upon entering the water system. Not only for the interest of money but also our health, proper disposal and recycling of E-waste are essential to reducing overall E-pollution.
I hope E-pollution is no longer an imaginary boogeyman by now. If not, there are still the other two components of the internet left to send up a red flag. The data centers are really just giant storage space for all the data on the internet (Pearce, 2018). This includes the family photos from summer vacation backed up on the cloud, the Call of Duty accounts, and the Amazon Fresh website. As a bedroom recluse, I have issues with my devices heating up from time to time, usually when I run an application that demands a lot of data. Data centers face the same problems, except they cannot afford to turn the machines off and back on or put them in rice (Pearce, 2018). If one of the major data centers was to go down, it would face lawsuits and compensations from its clients. When Google’s services were down for an hour in December 2020, the world crashed into chaos (Goldman, 2020). Many people, including myself, rely on Google to conduct daily tasks like studying, sending emails, watching YouTube videos, etc. Google had to compensate its premium users for the outage even though it was only for an hour (Goldman, 2020).
Maybe Google going down does not seem like a disaster, but Google is not the only service using data centers. There are banks, hospitals, the military, and other essential institutions that require a reliable internet and cloud service. The mighty Google took an hour to fix a server error, likely from a data center issue. I can understand why the industry wants to avoid an outage altogether, consequently turning data centers into colossal energy hogs. Companies not only want to prevent a system failure but to perform at maximum capacities at all times (Pearce, 2018). I am guilty of getting mad at a page taking longer than 3 seconds to load as well. The result is carbon emissions from the internet that match the emissions from all global airline activities combined (Cook et al., 2017).
To handle the heat from the restless machines, data centers use excess coolants and other systems to keep them from literally melting down. I imagine Silicon Valley as a tech haven, free of crude air pollution like diesel. However, the California state government’s Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory lists many Silicon Valley data centers as one of the top diesel polluters in the area (Glanz, 2012). Diesel is classified as a carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer under the World Health Organization (Tracy Wyant et al., 2015). Current literature primarily attributes diesel exhaust to an increased risk of lung cancer, but ultrafine particles (diameter <0.05–0.10 μm) emitted as a part of the diesel exhaust were reported to be capable of entering the bloodstream after penetrating the epithelium and the vascular walls (Sydbom et al., 2001). This suggests systematic consequences beyond lung cancer throughout various parts of our anatomy (Sydbom et al., 2001; Tracy Wyant et al., 2015). Despite these hazards, one can easily spot a windowless box of a data center even in crowded cities such as Downtown Los Angeles, consuming an enormous amount of energy, producing carbon emissions, and pumping out toxic exhausts.
Access networks put the finishing “Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo” touch to the magic of the internet by connecting end-user equipment and data centers. I rarely think about the physical wires and antennas around that let me use Instagram. The ugly overhead telephone lines, powerlines, internet cables, and even the satellites outside our stratosphere let us enjoy the wireless lifestyle.
To be honest, I was counting on the eccentric tech billionaire Elon Musk and other scientists to find us a new planet to inhabit if all else fails. Netflix recently premiered the movie Space Sweepers, a story of 2092 when the Earth is nearly inhabitable. The protagonists risk their lives collecting space debris and trading them for money to survive. This movie could be our future – at least in terms of space sweeping. The first satellite to orbit the Earth was Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Not even 70 years later, we have 2,000 active satellites and 3,000 dead satellites up there (O’Callaghan, 2021). Although we can pull back some of the large debris into the atmosphere for them to burn up, we can do nothing for the smaller debris piling up in space. These heaps of junk pose a threat to other satellites and space exploration (O’Callaghan, 2021). This is not a story of 2092 like in Space Sweepers. In October 2020, two pieces of debris almost collided, which would have created clouds of small debris that would jeopardize our satellites and spacecraft for centuries before falling back to the Earth’s atmosphere (Falk, 2020).
E-pollution deserves some of our “eco-guilt” to avoid the apocalyptic situation described in Space Sweepers. It is more relevant than ever due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has forced a paradigm shift to the virtual environment. I work, learn, volunteer, and attend concerts remotely. With this comes more E-pollution. I know that I am not the only one spending an unhealthy amount of time watching Netflix and YouTube. During the lockdown in March 2020, internet usage increased by 25% in a matter of days (Click, 2020). On average, people were spending almost 7 hours a day online in the third quarter of 2020 (Kemp, 2021). That is approximately half of the waking hours! This rate means that the total internet usage will reach about 12 trillion hours in 2021 alone, which is 1.3 billion years spent online by humanity.
I do not want to leave you with a Doomsday clock without any solutions. There are things we can do as individuals to reduce E-pollution. The first step is realizing that the internet is not invisible nor immaterial. The awareness will lead us to think about our internet habits and act more consciously in our daily lives. There is a distinct E-hoarding behavior that comes with the convenience of having every electronic data ever at our fingertips. We keep emails that would have been spam 20 years ago and the photos we would have burned after high school. We make backups and backups of those backups to ensure that we never lose anything – even the useless documents that just sit on your desktop. If used without a conscious effort to make electronic usage more “green,” the internet is not any better than using pen and paper like the old days – only convenient.
I recently had an email cleanse where I deleted all unnecessary emails and unsubscribed from email lists that I never check. I went through my cloud albums for photos and videos that I no longer want. It also saved me some embarrassment in the future because I did not want some of those photos ever to see the light of day. I stopped playing Netflix in the background when I barely pay attention to it. I turned off the automatic backup on my smartphone and took the time to assign specific folders for cloud synchronization instead. I do not need every screenshot I ever take to be always available in the cloud. The cleanse reduced my recurring carbon emission in a few hours, and I became more organized and aware of personal data. If you are paying for cloud services, you may even benefit financially by downgrading to a cheaper plan after a cleanse.
Although individual action is essential, my impact is only a drop in the ocean. There are larger organizations that can make a bigger splash than my E-cleanse. The other day, I debated whether my family should get an electric car or a classic oil-fueled car. Of course, I favored getting an electric vehicle to reduce our carbon footprint and be free of toxic exhaust. On the other hand, my father argued that an electric vehicle still uses the electricity generated from fossil fuel unless we decide to get our own solar panel. The same issue arises with E-pollution. As long as I use the internet, the industry’s infrastructure determines a large portion of my carbon footprint. If the IT industry were a country, it would be the third-largest contributor to climate change after China and the United States (Cook et al., 2017). Leading by example, Google contracted to purchase all solar power from the biggest solar energy farm in the Netherlands (Pearce, 2018). The solar energy farm supplies the energy required to operate one of its European data centers. Customers should welcome these macro-scale changes in energy production to encourage more companies to follow in Google’s footsteps.
Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming introduces solid-state wave energy as a candidate for the future of renewable energy (Hawken, 2017). The water is almost a thousand times denser than the air, making wave energy more efficient than wind turbines in theory. I instantly thought of its applications in data center maintenance and operation. Microsoft recently announced that underwater data centers have the potential to be practical, sustainable, and more reliable, with significantly lower failure rates than their counterparts on land (Roach, 2020). Since these data centers are already installed in a body of water, I believe that wave energy would be the most efficient form of renewable energy to support the system. Microsoft aims to use co-located renewable energy sources to make the data centers sustainable as well (Roach, 2020). Once we can balance the cost of wave technology with the benefits, it would undoubtedly be a great renewable energy source for data centers and beyond.
Besides using more renewable energy, enforcing policies to limit the impact of E-pollution should be an institutional responsibility. Not many countries consider how green the internet is, and there are fewer restrictions on the industry. It is growing fast, while the response to its environmental impact is sluggish at best. Remember the toxic, carcinogen-producing Eiffel towers? The developed countries export the E-waste to less developed parts of the world, such as Southeast Asia, to pollute their environment instead (Cho, 2018; John Vidal, 2013). I understand the capitalist drive behind maximizing revenue and minimizing cost, but how could we preach renewable energy and sustainable growth when we hand off our waste and pollution to less-developed nations? It is not fair for developed nations to restrict developing countries based on environmental pollution when they are responsible for almost 80% of historical carbon emissions (Center for Global Development, 2015). For instance, the U.S. could pass a federal law that prevents E-waste exports and subsidizes companies that recycle them professionally. Internationally, exchanging information on renewable energy to help developing nations establish enough infrastructure to support sustainable growth would be crucial to minimize E-pollution globally. I think it is, for the lack of better words, plain stupid to neglect developing nations for the interest of short-term profits from hoarding technology.
I used to enjoy dystopian futuristic movies that take place on inhabitable Earth. I thought Space Sweepers would be a lighthearted science fiction film that I could enjoy without worrying about how polluting my existence can be. I could not focus on the movie because the premise of the plot felt frighteningly close to home; it was no longer fiction. After knowing the cost of emails, online shopping, and video streaming, I see more chances to save energy and reduce pollution. The best part about the internet is the dynamic nature of the industry. We can change our internet habits to be cleaner and greener for the environment if we can treat E-pollution as a real threat to climate change instead of neglecting it like the pile of unread emails that will never be read.
References
Center for Global Development. (2015, August 18). Developed Countries Are Responsible for 79 Percent of Historical Carbon Emissions. Center For Global Development. https://www.cgdev.org/media/who-caused-climate-change-historically
Chasan, E. (2020, January 26). The environmental cost of keeping mail and files online keeps rising. The Japan Times. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/26/business/tech/email-global-warming/
Cho, R. (2018, August 27). What Can We Do About the Growing E-waste Problem? State of the Planet. https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/08/27/growing-e-waste-problem/
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