CALGARY, Canada — Although technology can be put to green use, a new study from the University of Calgary suggests that there is not yet any evidence that IT is reducing our overall environmental footprint.
Richard Hawkins, who is the Canada Research Chair in Science, Technology and Innovation Policy at the University of Calgary, finds that despite the potential for green IT to address larger environmental woes, the bulk of electronics is more a cause of, rather than solution to, environmental issues.
"It was once assumed that there was little or no material dimension to information technology, thus, it should be clean with minimal environmental impact," Hawkins, said. "However, we are finding that reality is much more complicated."
Despite the growth of awareness around and manufacturing toward greener electronics -- products that use fewer harmful materials, consume less energy during operation and idling, and are more easily recycled and reused -- the vast majority of electronics require large amounts of energy and resources to manufacture, and pile up in landfills at the end of their useful lives.
There is no shortage of companies and organizations at work not just on addressing the first-hand impacts of electronics, but also putting IT to work on addressing larger environmental issues. Last week, we reported on the
mobile phone industry's plan to green cell phones from production to charging to disposal, as well as news from the U.N. Environment Programme's summit in Kenya, where
Hewlett Packard and Microsoft each discussed ways to address IT's impact on the environment in Africa. And in our State of Green Business report, published at the beginning of February, we showed
the rapid growth in the number of computer products that meet EPEAT's standards for green electronics.
Regardless of the progress made thus far, Hawkins said that the electronics industry as a whole has a long way to go to become an overall boon to the economy.
"But probably most of the negative environmental impacts occur in the form of completely unintended, second and third order effects," Hawkins said. "These 'rebound' effects may not be mitigated by inventing 'greener' IT products and, indeed, may be intensified by such changes."
Hawkins will present his work at a European conference in March, as well as to the U.N.'s climate change gathering happening later this year in Copenhagen, Denmark; in the meantime he will continue to develop a measurement to accurately gauge the total impact of information technologies on the environment.
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