We’ve all seen the little messages at the foot of e-mails urging us to ‘save the planet’ by reducing unnecessary printing. The wonders of technology now mean we can send written communications to each other while avoiding the environmental impacts of producing paper and ink and using the energy needed for printing.
Hang on a minute though. Are paper copies necessarily a bad thing? How do we know technology is ‘greener’?
The speed of technology advances today is truly revolutionary. My childhood dreams (inspired by Blake’s 7 and Star Trek) of being able to videophone my mates are a reality, and so are a host of other amazing technologies. I can read the news, while watching video content and commenting on the article simultaneously.
This change means that business and consumers have unprecedented access to information and new ways of working. But the environmental and social impacts of this advancing technology are poorly understood. These alternatives to traditional media are often labelled as ‘green’ on the basis of massive assumptions and scant data.
The ICT sector has a proven track record of delivering high levels of energy efficiency gains year on year. While figures are difficult to obtain for this, Taylor and Koomey (2008) estimated that between 2000 and 2006 overall internet electricity energy use (to power the servers, data centres and network – not including home or office devices accessing the internet) roughly doubled, while internet data traffic grew by a factor of 20, meaning energy intensity in kW per GB was reduced by an order of magnitude.
However, consumers and business are demanding richer content and new channels to access information and engage more directly in discussion. The net result is that device obsolescence is huge, net energy demand to power this interactive, multi-channel world is going up as are the emissions associated with it.
According to the recent ‘Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity’ report by the McKinsey Global Institute, the projected growth in global data generated per year is 40 per cent. So while on the surface it seems common sense that moving to digital means lower impacts, it is not as simple as that.
Understanding the transition to digital
One area in which understanding the implications of this shift may mean the difference between being in or out of business is the media and publishing sector. Moving television or print media production to a predominantly digital platform means reinventing significant aspects of the existing business models.
At Two Tomorrows, we are convening a network of organisations – the Digital Sustainability Group – that includes Reed Elsevier, The Guardian, The Professional Publishers Association, BBC, Sanoma Group, The Energy Savings Trust and Pearson’s Penguin Group. The group is seeking to explore the sustainability impacts of this transition.
The group recognises that digital sustainability impacts are broad: from the ‘brainprint’ (the influence of the media on the user) through to energy use. Initially, we are focusing on carbon emissions with the aim of creating guidance that can be used to guide activities within media and publishing organisations to reduce emissions at key stages of the process: content creation, storage, distribution and use.
Take one stage of this process: data storage. There is a lot of guidance out there ranging from the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres to the Power Usage Efficiency metric to support the measurement of data centre efficiency.
While these are very useful and can enable comparisons on a like-for-like basis between data centres and companies, it is not the whole story. What is missing is the context and the translation – what does this mean for business planners and others who can influence the content that has to flow through the data centres?
Sure, you can make data centres work more efficiently, but what about the overall increase in emissions as the volume of data throughput rises dramatically? There has been a series of announcements about locating data centres in cold places to take advantage of natural cooling. However, the best example I have seen of data centre efficiency comes from Tieto, the Finnish ICT company, which utilises the heat generated by its data centre in Helsinki and which would otherwise be wasted in a district heating network.
Lack of data
The Digital Sustainability Group project is also pulling together information and data that is available and trying to make some sense of it. What is clear is that there is not much high-quality data that covers the whole process of creating and delivering digital media.
Often the data has a specific narrow scope, significant omissions and is based on very broad assumptions. Change some of the boundaries or assumptions and you can get a significantly different result. This hasn’t stopped some research designed for very limited context and lacking in rigour becoming known as fact.
One example of this relates to e-readers where data from an individual testing some software over a weekend with reasoned guesswork ended up being used as the basis for wider research into impacts of e-readers in general.
The results were widely used by the media and have been influential in creating the view that e-readers produce much less impact than printed books. Research in this area suggested that you have to read 36 e-books per year to make an e-reader the environmentally preferable option. Average book readership in the UK, according to a leading publisher, is about six books per year. I am not suggesting printed books are necessarily better than e-books; what I am suggesting is that care needs to be taken in using the limited research currently available and that more high-quality research is badly needed.
The impact of device manufacture
Another factor that surprised me, which I have now seen in two independently produced carbon footprints, is that the most significant emissions lifecycle stage with e-devices is the production of the device and especially the screens. I had anticipated that the use stage would produce more emissions, but apparently not. This generates renewed questions about device obsolescence and our obsession with the latest technology.
While the Digital Sustainability Group will not be producing all the answers, it is going some way to help business decision makers ask the right questions and make more considered decisions on the transition to digital media. What is clear is that significantly more quality research is needed, together with an increase in transparency and collaboration from the digital device manufacturers and the inherently complex digital content supply chain. Business decisions need to be better informed and driven less by current trends and assumptions.
The reality is that digital and print are complimentary and not an either/or. Use characteristics are also important. If you only want to dip in and read something for a short time, then maybe the internet via a tablet may be the option of least emissions. But if you want to get stuck into reading something for a longer period then maybe the magazine or book is the option of least emissions. In other words, device and use characteristics are looking like they are more important than the channel the media is delivered through.
And so should you print this article? Probably not. Local printing is much less efficient than bulk printing. But take care with assuming everything electronic has less emissions and a lower environmental impact.
Find out more about the Digital Sustainability Group by contacting rob.pearson@twotomorrows.com
This article first appeared on the Business Computing World website
Tags: climate change, dave knight, digital media, publishing, sustainability