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DIGITAL WASTE
Argument
Mineral resources are essential to our modern industrial society and they are used everywhere. For example, at breakfast you drink some juice in a glass (made from melted quartz sand), eat from a ceramic plate (created from clay minerals) and answer your cellphone (containing over 40 different minerals including copper, silver, gold, and platinum). We need minerals to make cars, computers, appliances, concrete roads, houses, electrical transmission lines. Without mineral resources, industry would collapse and living standards would plummet. In 2010, the average person in the U.S. consumed more than 16,000 pounds of mineral resource. With an average life expectancy of 78 years, that translates to about 1.3 million pounds of mineral resources over such a person’s lifetime.
But what price do we pay for having tens of modern items made from mineral resources? For example The Bingham Canyon mine is an open pit, copper, gold, silver and molybdenum mine located 28 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah. It is considered the largest open pit mine in North America, covering roughly 27,000 acres of land. Approximately 6 billion tons of rock have been removed from the pit, which is 3/4 mile deep and 2 3/4 miles across.
The mine is a source of major environmental contamination.
It is the second most polluting mine in the US by toxic releases. The north zone of the mine is proposed for listing as one of the US’s most significant hazardous waste sites. State and federal agencies have repeatedly had to relyon legal or administrative action to compel the company to respond to impacts.
Mining activities have resulted in damage to fish and wildlife habitat, extensive water pollution, and public health and safety risks. The mine and its expansion plans are a threat to air quality as well.
1/ AWARENESS:
Dependency & Sustain tool paradox:
- Modern society has become dependent on technology.
- Paradoxically, we also depend on Digital devices, networks & information sharing platforms to reshape industry as well as society and become more sustainable.
- At a gas station, the immediate cost and the smell of petrol is a potent reminder that we are consuming energy. The digital economy is built on the sensation of seamlessness—but it still comes with a utility bill.
- Data Centres (where all digital content is stored) consume large amounts of energy for server operation and cooling.
- And these servers never rest – we cannot shut down the Internet at certain times of the day.
- it takes more electricity to stream a high-definition movie over a wireless network than it would have taken to manufacture and ship a DVD of that same movie.
- Data infrastructure uses about 1,500 Terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity annually: 10% of world electricity generation (which is 50% more energy than the global aviation industry.) [Digital Power Group]
- Using your device to watch an hour of video per week for a year consumes annually as much electricity as a refrigerator.
- According to a Greenpeace reports, IT-related services now account for 2% of all global carbon emissions,
- the number of people online is expected to grow by 60% over the next five years.
- As a consequence, analysts predict that data use will triple between 2012 and 2017 to 121 exabytes, or 121 billion gigabytes.
- While shifting businesses to an online model can create significant gains in energy efficiency, the energy appetite of the internet continues to outstrip those gains due to its dramatic growth.
- Internet infrastructure was responsible for releasing 9 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases (GHG) in 2011 or 1.9% of world emissions. [Boston Consulting Group]
Fortunately, some positive businesses trends have developed over the past years.
- More energy efficient operation methods of data centers are being researched and implemented but cannot offset the growing energy demand (growing data traffic)
- for this reason, Renewable energy sources must be included into powering data centers for significant change.
- Economic incentives for renewable energy use include
- Dropping costs for renewable energy, and increasing prices for fossil fuels.
- As well as the fact that Sustainability offers corportations an opportunity for improved public relations and image.
- Greenpeace recently called for a commitment of companies to transparency on IT performance and consumption of resources, including the source of electricity, to enable customers, investors, and stakeholders to measure environmental performance.
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- Such commitments by industry leaders send a powerful signal to both utilities and colocation providers that if they expect to earn the business of these companies, they will need to provide a strategy for how they can help them achieve this goal.
E-waste
Electronics and electrical appliances are taking over, the world is getting more and more
connected, through the internet. We buy new devices each year, to make our life easier
and catch up with what is current; the internet usage is booming, growing from 100 GB /
sec in 2000 to12,000 GB / sec in 2012 as expected to triple in the year 2017 (36000
GB/Sec), the number of people online is expected to grow by 60% over the next five
years. We are living in a pleasant world, but had we thought about how this device
came to our hands?
In this research, we question the real footprint of the whole electronic industry on multi-
levels-through studying the life of a device and the flow of e-waste; as well as what
formal and informal treatment of e-waste reflect.
Framework
//As a frame work, we started by the very basic production unit, the mining sites, which
are basically located on the west coast of the American continent, afterwards, displaying
through a video the reality of what goes on in the factories – china as an example-
which produces the devices, sells them, gets them back as e-waste and then
reprocessing them.
To further understand our territory, We mapped
? Location of the ten major mines in the world, an understanding to the basic
component
? Location – by volume of the main data centers worldwide, which are the
backstage
? location – by volume- of the major producers of e-waste, starting with the greater
territory
? location – by volume- of the major e-waste dumping sites
? the flow of e-waste
? close-up view on the most busy regions of e-waste receivers – China, India and
Singapore
? case study on Singapore recycling places – to understand the flow on a micro
scale (formal treatment) – More specific site
? case study on Ghana’s largest e-waste dump – and how it affects the urban
fabric around it (informal treatment) – More specific site
and a comparison between Ghana’s fabric around the e-waste as compared to
Singapore.
Data infrastructure uses about 1,500 Terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity annually: 10%
of world electricity generation (50% more than the energy used by the global aviation
industry.) [Digital Power Group]
Telecommunication networks contributed 22% of total emissions (0.20 billion tones of
GHG in 2011)
Data centers’ carbon footprint counted for 17% of total emissions (0.16 billion tones of
GHG).
We are recycling no more than 14% of the e-waste produced
Africa, India, China, Singapore, Ghana, Nigeria, brazil, are the major dumping sites,
how can that be beneficial for these countries? How is that affecting the world
distribution of users/producers? What actually happens in these dumping sites?
Mines, which have a great ecological imprint produce the raw material which is then
transported to the manufacturing countries – which are different countries- to be turned
into smart devices we use, through labor intensive processes, consumed majorly by the
states, Europe and Australia and then dumped in Ghana, Nigeria, China, and
Singapore.
It has became a profession in Ghana, families have been passing this job from a
generation to another, with all the toxic gasses, and material dissolving in the earth
water and the soil.
A model of an intelligent site, would be the Singapore model, where Singapore imports
e-waste, but spends as much as 72 recycling points to resell this mass. So what would
be a possible solution for Ghana
In Ghana the urban fabric has already been shaped by the dump sites, slums
developed close to the dumps, people collect the e-waste, try to get the best out of it
and sell it again.
But all that is done manually, whereas in Singapore, recycling plants are all atomized in
a more optimized, scheduled manner.
Firas Safieddine
Tobias DeeG
Martin Hirstov