TELECOMS
THE CARBON FOOTPRINT OF YOUR SMARTPHONE
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The mobile phone in your pocket ( or balanced precariously against your morning glass of orange juice as you read this over breakfast ) doesn ’ t actually use that much energy , but the amount of juice demanded by the network it runs on is considerably higher . In a Guardian article , Mike Berners-Lee - a leading carbon footprinting and author of the book How Bad are Bananas ? The Carbon Footprint of Everything - noted that the carbon cost of a minute of phone usage was about 57g , “ about the same as an apple , most of a banana or a very large gulp of beer .” Those gulps of beer and partial bananas translate to about 47kg CO2e ( or carbon dioxide equivalent ) a year if your typical usage is just under 2 minutes per day . An average of an hour ’ s usage per day means that your phone ’ s annual impact rockets up to 1250kg CO2e .
According to a report by Anthropocene Magazine , noted that
“ data centres and telecom networks are energy hogs . Operating them results in about two-thirds of information and communications industry ( ICT ) emissions , growing from 215 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2007 to 764 megatons in 2020 .” However , most of the environmental cost of a smartphone ( 85-95 % actually ) is incurred before it reaches your hands , by the mining of the metals it contains , as well as its manufacturing process . By the end of this year , smartphone emissions will account for 11 % of total ICT emissions .
The report also suggests that solutions to this issue should range from government policies and tax incentives aimed at spurring on renewable energy power purchase agreements for the manufacturing process , to consumers holding onto their current devices as long as possible , and recycling devices when upgrading .
SEPTEMBER 2020