How are data, digital technology, and the internet impacting our physical world and climate change?
By Tom Jarrett and Alexandra Plesner
The billions of devices many of us use every day could produce 3.5% of global emissions within ten years and 14% by 2040. – World Economic Forum
“Data centres aren’t JUST the culprits — social media and mobile phones drive it. It’s films, pornography, gambling, dating, shopping — AND anything that involves images” – Professor Ian Bitterlin
Charging up a single tablet or phone uses negligible electricity, but watching an hour of video weekly consumes more energy than two refrigerators annually. – Digital Power Group Report
As designers, we have been strategising and making digital products and services since the first iPhone came out. We now work for a London-based data design studio. Normally, we also make digital products and services, but more interestingly, we are on an expedition to explore the material properties of data. This got us to research and think about how data and digital technology impact the physical world and climate change.
We are currently in a climate emergency. The United Nations declared last year that we only have 11 years left to prevent irreversible damage from climate change. The ideology of infinite growth has become unfeasible, and we must start rapidly transitioning to a more sustainable approach. It’s been said that we’re the first generation to feel the full force of climate change, and almost certainly, the last will be able to do anything about it.
So why is this matter to us?
The tech industry has the same carbon footprint as the airline industry, and if the Internet were a country, it would be the third-largest consumer of electricity in the world, behind China and the United States.
We need to start rethinking how we’re building digital technologies. The internet has so many amazing benefits, and digital technology will be an important part of communicating, organising and reworking the future, so we need to make it fit for a more sustainable world.
Current Situation and Future Predictions
Data storage could balloon to 8% of planetary energy use by 2030. And the traffic to data centres is only going up. This is because we’re online increasingly, and connected devices are on the rise, estimated to hit about 30 billion or even 50 billion in the next few years.
This increase is because of the Internet of Things, wearable technologies, smart homes, smart cities, cloud gaming, M2M smart meters, video surveillance, healthcare monitoring, transportation, packaging tracking, etc., so many things are now connected, and it’s just ever-expanding. This is well illustrated by the Amazon Alexa 4 announcement, with Alexa now finding its way into speakers, glasses, rings, earbuds, doorbells, microwaves, bedside lamps, and dog collars. There are also the many connected devices that sink into the background of our everyday life that we don’t think about, like smart meters, video surveillance, facial technology, healthcare monitoring, and things like tracking your Amazon delivery.
Mary Meeker’s internet trend report last year estimated that each connected person makes around 1,500 data interactions per day, which is expected to balloon in the next five years to nearly 5,000.
New technology is also adding to the footprint of the current ecosystem. Technologies like AI, machine learning and cryptocurrencies are currently very energy intensive. The carbon footprint of training a single AI., for example, was recently estimated as being as much as 284 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of five times the lifetime emissions of an average car.
Already in 2017, the prediction was that the billions of devices we use daily could be around 3.5% of global emissions and, by 2040, as much as 14%.
This leads us to the obvious question: what about sustainable data centres? Some tech giants have certificates saying they have 100% sustainable energy sources. Still, the reality is that it’s not that simple, and there’s an incredibly complicated mix of clean energy generated from their buildings and energy drawn off the grid during power surges. There’s also more of a commitment to offsetting emissions than eliminating them.
Even building more renewable energy infrastructure requires a lot of energy and raw materials and uses many unrecyclable materials, including batteries that require fossil fuels. Renewable energy also requires a lot more physical space than fossil fuels.
The big problem is meeting the energy demand, which only increases with an explosion in traffic to and from data centres. The size of data traffic was 1.1 ZB in 2017 and is expected to explode to around 125 ZB by 2025. This expansion requires physical infrastructure, from fibre optic cables that run through the oceans to the large data centres and fans that cool them. Running and cooling these machines blows through an estimated 5% of total energy use in the country. Without that power, the cloud burns up.
This has led some tech companies to sink data centres off the Scottish and Swedish coast or bury them inside Norwegian mountains, where they get cooled by pristine, near-freezing water from a fjord. Savings of even a few degrees Celsius can significantly extend the lifespan of electronic components; Microsoft reports that on the ocean floor 117 feet down, its racks stay 10 degrees cooler than their land-based counterparts.
It is an initially bold and noble idea, but it also has an environmental impact. As data centres sit underwater, they are now pumping their heat into the sea, warming up the area around them and influencing microbiology.
An area in Northern Sweden quickly becoming a global hub for data traffic and high-end data centre hosting, isolated geographically, and given the region is one of the coolest in Sweden, the so-called “Node Pole”, is attracting companies like Facebook, which agreed in October 2011 to build its first data centre outside the U.S. Still, the problem is more extensive than what looks like an eco-friendly solution for cooling data centres. Lars Schedin, CEO of Ecodatacenter, puts it best — “All the heat they are generating, they’re just throwing it out of the window. You can see changes in the microclimate around big data centres. If you’re looking to have palm trees in the northern part of Sweden, then that’s good. Still, suppose you want to maintain the current climate in northern Sweden. In that case, you should force data centres to reuse the heat somehow”.
Digital Consumption
An increase in infrastructure and data centres is necessary because of our ever-growing digital consumption, driven by social media, streaming tv and music, pornography, gambling, dating, shopping etc. These are the things that we’re consuming in ever higher amounts without being made aware of their environmental impact.
The music industry is an interesting case in point. Now music has become less ‘physical’; it seems logical that it would be better for the environment not to have to produce CDs and Vinyl from plastic and ship them around the world. But from a carbon emissions perspective, the transition towards streaming recorded music from internet-connected devices has resulted in significantly higher carbon emissions than at any previous point in music history. In the U.S. alone, the estimated carbon emission from music consumption is between 200 million kilograms and over 350 million kilograms.
But we believe it’s essential to note that it shouldn’t be about shaming individual habits; it’s counterproductive to try and shame people for watching YouTube or Netflix or uploading photos on social media. This is why we are trying to focus this conversation on design. We should be designing these products and services more sustainably instead of putting all the burden and responsibility on the user.
We feel it’s also strongly linked with the attention economy, social media in particular with algorithmically ordered content and the goal of large platforms to keep users engaged, scrolling and uploading more content. This is also linked to online advertising. More trackers, more ads, and more data being sent to different companies add to the weight of our daily interactions.
How technology is designed and built encourages digital overconsumption and is becoming unsustainable concerning the supply of energy and materials it requires. So, perhaps, instead of gambling on infinite growth and the hypothetical development of a post-scarcity world where we’ve got abundant energy and sustainably resourced, maybe we need to start thinking about a post-abundance world, one where an unlimited desire for everything, anytime is replaced by a more sustainable approach in how we design and consume digital products and services.
Personal Data Experiment — by Tom Jarrett
All of the above got me thinking, and I wanted to make this a bit more of a personal and tangible story because I’m aware that a lot of this ends up being numbers and figures with several zeros at the end and dates in the distant future. I wanted to try and visualise the issues and make more tangible some of these figures and concepts
I found “Carbonalyser” by Richard Hanna, Gauthier Roussilhe, and the Shift Project. It is a Firefox plug-in that allows visualising the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that your Internet browsing leads to for you to understand the impacts of digital technologies on climate change and natural resources.
For one week, I ran all of my digital use through Firefox, my emails, listening to music, everything I watched and everything I did on my phone I did through the plugin. I kept track of everything to try and see how much energy and carbon I was using. This is an estimate based on the calculations within Carbonalyser, measuring co2 is notoriously difficult, but I think it’s a useful way to at least get a window into my digital consumption and how different services and activities compare to each other.
So my digital consumption footprint was around 14kg of carbon emissions on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. It dipped to under 9kg of carbon on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and then went back to around 12kg on Monday.
It is probably worth noting that Normally, we work four days a week, and I thought my digital consumption would be way higher on weekends because of having more free time, watching Netflix and using social media more. Still, I was using substantially more at work. This, in hindsight, makes sense, given my job is to sit on a laptop all day, and I usually have Spotify, Slack Emails etc., on all the time running in the background.
So in total, for one week, I estimated my digital consumption to be 74.2kg. To put it into context is the equivalent of flying from London to Zurich.
Some surprising insights came out of the experiment. I was shocked to see that spending 5 minutes on an e-commerce website was higher than watching 5 minutes on YouTube, for example.
Also, news and online articles were surprisingly energy intensive. I saw a link on Twitter to a piece entitled “Navy Confirms UFO Videos Posted by Blink 182 Rocker Are Real and Should Not Have Been Released”. I knew it was clickbait, but I had to click it, and I was quite staggered about how heavy this webpage was from NBC. It had videos, trackers, adverts, and loads of other clickbait news sites that kept popping up, and it took 127g of co2 just opening this one article.
I’m old enough to remember that designing a website was about keeping it as light as possible. Now we’ve overly bloated all of these things with so many unnecessary features, which are there to get more clicks on content, more views on a video or more ad impressions and not in any way designed to improve the user experience.
I decided to group the data and put them into categories so I could make more sense of my consumption. To me, who thought video streaming would be by far the largest, I had to face the fact that social media was the now largest group making up 34%. And I’m someone who feels like they don’t even really use social media that much.
I was quite surprised, so I wanted to look into this area more and of course when you look at the interface design, it becomes very clear why services like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter were so high. They’re all image- and video-heavy, designed to keep your attention, keep you stimulated, scrolling and clicking. The result is very energy-intensive digital products.
Prototyping
We decided to prototype some experiments around social media to see how it could look if we designed products and services more energy-consciously. We’re aware these changes would have to be done at the Twitter or Instagram level, for example, but nevertheless, these are provocations and prototypes to help think about how this could be done. So in this Twitter example, we tried giving content space again, not bombarding users and allowing them to choose consciously what they want to look at.
We then thought about Instagram, and rather than having an algorithm-dictated stream of content served to you that you then scroll through and subconsciously absorb, maybe it would be better to give “choice” back to the user, who might not want to be looking at an influencers’ gym selfie or someone’s holiday photos. Not even mention the mental health impact that this could have.
In this experiment, we thought about using image recognition or the alt text that Instagram has to show a descriptive version of an image in the text, which you can choose to see by tapping the eye icon. Then having a daily carbon footprint allowance indicates how many more images and videos you can see. So the user can decide if they want to use up their allowance by looking at another photo of “a cup of coffee on a wooden table”, for example.
And expanding this idea further, how about a little meter at the top of your browser or phone that keeps building up until you reach your daily limit of in and outcoming data?
Applied Design Examples
The “light” versions of our services are possible and already happening, but mainly out of necessity to expand into less developed countries with slower internet connections and devices. Uber launched Uber Lite, less than 5MB to download, compared to the regular Uber app’s 181.4MB size. The design is very stripped-back, with maps optional to keep it running fast and smooth. Facebook also went back to basics with Messenger Lite back in 2017.
Facebook also went back to basics with Messenger Lite back in 2017.
We want to raise awareness and open up a conversation about this within the design and tech community and start rethinking and discussing how we can build digital products and services more sustainably. Those of us designing and building these technologies should start making our tools better, and this shouldn’t be about shaming individual users. You don’t need to live a life of perfect environmental virtue to be involved in the conversation and action around climate change. The internet will be crucial in starting these conversations, organising and building a better future.
