it worth thinking about? For sure. If you are interested in lowering your electronic and internet emissions, simply unplug and turn of your computer when it isn’t in use. Taking simple steps such as reducing phantom energy use are important. The next time it dies for good, consider buying one second-hand, which lowers the emissions related to manufacturing and electronic waste disposal. Here’s another big one: could you possibly work from home two days a week? If the forty percent of American workers who could work from home two days a week did so, we would see a a fifty-three million metric ton reduction in greenhouse gasses. Check out this info graphic: apparently, telecommuters even increase their productivity from home.

So, should you go cold turkey and drop your blog reading, tweeting, and Facebook surfing? Of course not. Is it worth thinking about? For sure. If you are interested in lowering your electronic and internet emissions, simply unplug and turn of your computer when it isn’t in use. Taking simple steps such as reducing phantom energy use are important. The next time it dies for good, consider buying one second-hand, which lowers the emissions related to manufacturing and electronic waste disposal. Here’s another big one: could you possibly work from home two days a week? If the forty percent of American workers who could work from home two days a week did so, we would see a a fifty-three million metric ton reduction in greenhouse gasses. Check out this info graphic: apparently, telecommuters even increase their productivity from home.

A common example when explaining the environmental impact of the internet is to use Google searches. In 2009, a Harvard physicist found that while one search is insignificant on its own, calculating the overall effect is, in fact, worthwhile. These are some of his findings: “Twenty milligrams of CO2 are generated every second that someone is using a simple website. As a comparison, an air-freighted orange generates one million milligrams of carbon. So it’s not much right? Well, there are 35 billion minutes logged online every month from users worldwide.” How does that even work, you ask? Well, the information you’re searching for on the internet is in fact not just kept in the “virtual world.” Simply put, when you search for a cute kitten or laughing baby video (which we’ve all done), your question is sent to thousands of servers, found in huge data-center buildings, that use lots of electricity. The more data processed through these servers, the more electricity used, the more emissions generated. As an example, in 2005, the U.S. had 10.3 million data centers, which consumed enough energy within one year to power the entire United Kingdom for two months.

Much of what happens on the internet is also not controlled by one individual, and, in fact, many would prefer that it didn’t happen at all…such as getting spam. Of course, when you see that a spam email made it into your inbox, your initial frustration is not with the wasted energy use, but maybe it should be. Sixty-two trillion spam emails are sent every year, generating as much energy use as 1.6 million cars driving around the earth.

When I started off writing this book my idea was that it should only be available in a digital format because that would be much more environmentally friendly than a print version. I wanted to show that, under the right circumstances, digital was clearly better for the environment. As I did my research, I found that it was not as simple as I had first thought. Digital creates a sort of mirage when it comes to environmental friendliness. It can feel better for the environment to read something on a screen than to pick up a physical book. A digital book feels “lighter” than a physical book. All is not what it seems. The weight of digital is displaced from the book itself to the device upon which you read it, and from the device to the data center and the network that stores and delivers the book. Increasingly, your behavior as you read the book is being analyzed. That costs energy. There is always a weight to digital, always a cost to the Earth. Too often it is a hidden weight and a hidden cost. When we look out across a physical landscape, we can generally get a sense of it. It’s not so easy with digital. Our senses were not designed for digital interactions. We can be easily fooled. We need to train ourselves better to understand the true nature of digital, the true impact of digital on ourselves and on the Earth, as well as its true potential to make the environment better. We can do this. It will take time and effort. According to a 2010 New York Times analysis, one e-reader required 50 times the minerals and 40 times the amount of water to manufacture than a print book. You’d need to read more than 100 books on an e-reader before it would have a lower pollution impact than reading the equivalent number of print books. A 2009 analysis by Clean Tech consultancy had a much lower figure, estimating that you’d only need to read about 23 books on an e-reader before it would be a better choice for the environment.  In 2016, Pew Research reported that a typical US citizen reads about four books a year. That would mean that an average person would need to hold on to their e-reader anywhere from six to 25 years for it to become the environmentally friendly choice.  Another thing that tends to happen in digital—particularly in the “free” model—is download without consumption. Richard Lea, writing for The Guardian in 2015, reported on studies of e-book reading that showed that 60% of e-books bought were never opened. The completion rates for those that were started could be as low as 20%. Not surprisingly, one study by e-book maker Kobo found that the more people paid for a book, they more likely they were to read it. Waste flows from the free mindset. 70% to 90% of the total pollution caused by a digital device is caused during its manufacture. This is a relatively new phenomenon, as traditional manufactured electrical/petrol-based products tend to cause most of their pollution during their lifetime of use. What this means is that the moment you buy an e-reader you acquire something that has already caused very significant pollution. It needs to be used a lot before it is “better” for the environment than reading in print.  Of course, using something digital does cause some pollution. There is the cost of downloading the content and there is the cost of processing and reading it. If the content is “free” then these costs can be substantial because digital advertising, which underpins the free model, is highly toxic and environmentally damaging. A 2009 study from the Swedish KTH Center for Sustainable Communications found that if you read news for about 10 minutes a day, then digital was a more environmentally friendly option. However, if you read news for more than 30 minutes a day, a print newspaper was the best option. A 2019 study of music streaming by the University of Glasgow and the University of Oslo found that if you listened to a particular song a lot, it would be better to play that song from a CD or have it stored on your local hard drive, rather than constantly streaming it.  Luckily, books are generally not advertising dependent, so the impact of a particular book is down to its file size. The things that influence digital file size include:  The number of images, charts and tables used and the formats they are saved in. Whether the book is full color or black and white. The number of pages. The type of font being used. If it is a standard font, the impact will be low. If it is a custom font the impact will be higher. The number of words have relatively little impact on file size because text itself is by far the most environmentally friendly form of communication. In 2018, I published Top Tasks. It was almost 42,000 words. It was in black and white except for a simple two-color cover. This book, World Wide Waste, is 51,000 words. It’s in black and white, including cover. Top Tasks had quite a few tables and webpage screengrabs. Its epub file size was 5.5 MB. World Wide Waste has no images or tables. It has almost 20% more words though. It has an epub file size of 0.35 MB. Its file size is thus nearly 94% smaller than that for Top Tasks, even though it has 9,000 more words. That’s a huge weight difference. That’s much lighter on the environment, less stressful, less polluting. A reason why World Wide Waste has a much smaller carbon footprint than Top Tasks is because I was thinking about digital weight throughout the entire processes of writing and publishing. For example, I chose Times New Roman as the book font because it is a standard font. Had I chosen a custom font, that would have added extra weight. At every step in the process, I watched my weight, and it paid off.  We must always think about the weight of digital. Things can get very heavy very quickly without us noticing. Weight equals pollution. It is often unnecessary weight. It does not add any value. In digital, we are constantly negatively impacting the environment for no benefit to anyone. There’s not much point in saving the planet offline if you’re killing it online. Think of the weight of everything you do in digital. I have set out to make this book the least weight possible. It is black and white, and I have not used images or charts. I have used Times New Roman as a font, which is a standard font, thus it will have less weight. The whole process of writing and researching this book has been a major wake-up call for me. It’s only a few years ago that, as I was reading about a small group of concerned citizens protesting against the opening of an Apple data center in Ireland, I was thinking to myself: “What are these fools doing? Why are they against jobs and progress? What could be wrong with a data center?” There’s a lot wrong with data centers, despite the fact that they have become much more energy efficient. The millions of computer servers that they use all require significant energy to manufacture, contributing to the mountains of e-waste and pollution. These data centers facilitate Instagram Culture which accelerates fast fashion; they facilitate Ride-Hailing Culture which accelerates congestion and pollution; they facilitate Ecommerce Culture which has accelerated the return of goods so that now it is three times higher than the rate in physical stores. 

There are about three trillion trees in the world, according research by Thomas Crowther, a professor at Yale. Since the beginning of human civilization, the global number of trees has fallen by about 46%. We lose 15 billion trees a year, according to Time magazine, and plant five billion, according to Tentree, giving us a net loss of 10 billion.  Trees breathe carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, which makes them an ideal part of the solution to climate change. A part. The scientific consensus is that it is not possible to plant nearly enough trees to even come close to combating global warming. We need to plant ideas and take action even faster. Ideas that focus on consuming less and conserving more. Trees can absorb anything from 6 kg to 22 kg of CO2 per year. “The average Pine tree absorbs about 10 kilograms of CO2 per year,” GoTreeQuotes states. For simplicity purposes, I will use a figure of 10 kg in my calculations throughout the rest of the book.  It’s not that simple, though. It never is. Almost all trees both emit and absorb methane, a gas that, while it lasts in the atmosphere for a lot less time than CO2, is estimated to be 30 times more polluting. In tropical rainforests, in particular, trees can emit substantially more methane than they absorb. However, “In the wider world of climate change, their benefits are almost always much greater,” researcher Sunitha Pangala told YaleEnvironment360. “Even for an individual tree, the methane element usually turns out to be quite small compared to carbon storage.” Trees, of course, have many other benefits, as journalist Fred Pearce points out: “They recycle moisture, create shade, stimulate cloud formation, protect biodiversity, and cleanse the air.” It was only relatively recently that Sunitha Pangala’s research helped identify the methane impact of trees, and she did it with the support of digital technology. Digital can help us understand our world much better. It can give us the information that can help us to optimize our environment, to target where the waste comes from, and to promote activities that conserve. Perhaps there are certain types of tree that produce less methane? Digital can help us find out. But we must want to do this. We must want to conserve. We must want to not waste.  We need to plant more trees. Again, here’s where technology can help. Drones can plant trees 150 times faster than traditional methods and with tremendous accuracy, reaching areas that are inaccessible to humans. They’re also cheaper.  This is not a book about digital’s amazing potential. It is a book about why we have not nearly realized that potential, how we are in fact currently using it in ways that are destructive to societal wellbeing and the wellbeing of the planet. I’m going to suggest actions that we can take to take control of digital so that we use it for more positive purposes. One of the most difficult challenges with digital is to truly grasp what it is, its form, its impact on the physical world. I want to help give you a feel for digital. Throughout the book, I’m going to analyze how many trees would need to be planted to offset a particular digital activity. For example:  1.6 billion trees would have to be planted to offset the pollution caused by email spam. 1.5 billion trees would need to be planted to deal with annual e-commerce returns in the US alone.  231 million trees would need to be planted to deal with the pollution caused as a result of the data US citizens consumed in a 2019. 16 million trees would need to be planted to offset the pollution caused by the estimated 1.9 trillion yearly searches on Google. 

Up to 90% of what we take from the Earth and make into digital stuff, quickly ends up as waste, much of it useless, toxic and dangerous. Digital is the most ravenous and fastest growing child in a mob of production hunting down natural resources. According to the 2019 International Resource Panel report: The use of natural resources has more than tripled since 1970 and continues to grow.  From 2000 to 2015, the climate change and health impacts from extraction and production of metals doubled. 90% of biodiversity loss and water stress are caused by resource extraction and processing. Consumption is ramping up at a speed never before experienced in human history. China consumed 6.6 gigatons of cement between 2011 and 2013. That’s more cement than the US consumed during the entire 20th century, Forbes reported. “The world has almost doubled its energy consumption since 1980,” Bloomberg reported in 2019. It is hard to even imagine how wasteful we are as a species. The more research I did for this book, the more shocked I became. Huge quantities of products never even get bought and end up as waste. The stuff we buy, a great deal of it we barely even use—it ends up as waste. We hardly recycle. Most stuff goes straight to the dump or into the ocean. Humans are wasters. Digital encourages extreme waste and an extreme waste mindset. I will focus throughout this book on how 90% of what we do in digital is either useless waste to begin with or else quickly ends up in a data dump or a physical dump. 90%. It’s one thing to deplete natural resources in order to create useful things, things that we need to live, to eat, to keep warm, to get around in, to be entertained with. To dig up the Earth in order to create a giant dump of unnecessary crap, of half-baked products and services, of gadgets that meet nothing but a passing whim, to leave YouTube streaming in an empty room on a large screen, to back up files that have absolutely no useful function, that sort of behavior should make us feel ashamed.  “72% of the global ice-free land surface is dedicated to supporting humans,” according to Mark Lynas writing for CNN in 2019. There are at least five million species and possibly many more, according to research by the University of Sydney, but between a quarter and a third of the entire output of the world’s plants is consumed by the human species.  In the last 40 years, there has been a 60% decline in the population sizes of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians, according to the World Wildlife Fund. “More than half of all insects may have disappeared since 1970,” the World Economic Forum reported in 2020. The UN has described the situation as “unprecedented” and “accelerating.” Digital rises, nature declines.  I still believe that, properly used, digital can help us conserve this beautiful planet. It is digital that is helping us analyze the vast amount of data on climate. It is digital that allows us to make reasonably accurate predictions. Digital can help us plan better and work more efficiently, thus saving energy and resources. Digital has massive positive potential. 

Correlation is not causation. Just because massive investments in digital technology are correlated with a rapid increase in global warming, rapid growth in natural resource depletion, huge increases in waste production, poor productivity, and a decline in the middle class in the very economies who have embraced digital the most, it does not mean that digital caused all these things.  Digital could be an innocent bystander to historical events outside its control or ability to influence. Which is a bit worrying, isn’t it? I totally bought into this whole Digital Revolution thing that kicked off in the mid-Nineties with the advent of the World Wide Web. If we’re saying that there’s no causation here, are we also saying that Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google (FANG) don’t matter that much to the big picture? That FANG has had no real impact—either positive or negative—on global warming, productivity and the decline of the middle class? That the Web itself is neither here nor there when it comes to the lives of ordinary people? That all this Digital Revolution stuff is just tech candy? That’s a hard sell, isn’t it?  Digital is no innocent bystander. Digital matters. Digital is shaping our lives. Digital is shaping our planet. Digital is an accelerant and a concentrator. Right now, it is accelerating bad behavior and concentrating wealth. Digital puts the foot to the pedal and shunts us forward at a speed we are currently not capable of coping with. Beyond certain points, speed becomes dangerous and highly wasteful. We are racing into the future with no seat belt.  Earth Overshoot Day marks the date when we have used more natural resources than the Earth can regenerate in a given year. In 2019, it was July 29. It is the “advanced” digital economies that are doing by far the most overshooting. In the United States, 2019 Overshoot Day arrived on March 15, in Canada on March 16, in Denmark on March 29, in Sweden on April 3, in Finland on April 6. At the other end of the calendar, in Indonesia Overshoot Day didn’t arrive until December 18, in Ecuador on December 14, in Iraq on December 7. Think of what would happen to the Earth if every country became an “advanced” digital nation? Whether global warming is happening or not, the way we live in the “advanced” digital world is not sustainable. Every year, Overshoot Day gets earlier. When the 1970s started, it was close to January 1, so we were in a type of balance, with the Earth renewing at the same pace as we were using up resources. As you’ll see throughout this book, in the last 40–50 years we’ve gone into hyperdrive, using up everything at a pace never before seen in human history.

I was lucky enough to catch the Internet wave back around 1994. It was incredibly exciting and financially rewarding. It seemed obvious to me that digital was a good thing for our society and economy. When more people started talking about global warming in the early 2000s, I felt lucky to be involved in a sector that I believed was inherently environmentally friendly. Becoming more digital seemed like the answer to global warming. Our physical activities were destroying the planet, but our digital activities would help save it. That’s what I believed. I had some nagging doubts, though. Since the late Nineties, I have worked on a lot of intranets and internal systems. Peering inside a typical organization at their IT infrastructure was like going on an archaeological dig. The external “branding” may have made the organization look modern but the internal IT systems had that ancient feeling to them, riven with complexity and appallingly designed; usability close to zero. 

Technology may be responsible for environmental destruction. But new technologies are undoubtedly helping to reverse the situation.

The Internet Some modern technology is helping to save the environment. For instance, e-commerce consumes a third less energy than brick-and-mortar stores because people don’t have to drive to stores to pick up items. The same applies to things like online casinos. The more that people visit online casinos like Casumo to play slots and table games, the less they will pollute by driving to a traditional casino. So, the internet is contributing to lowering carbon emissions. Renewable Energy Technology As environmental destruction begins to reach a crisis point, there has been a recent rise in global companies developing and using new environmental technology to create a more sustainable and low-carbon world. Renewable energy is one way in which technology is advancing to help save the environment. The energy is collected from renewable resources like wind, rain, tides, and sunlight. Technological advancements like wind and water turbines are the future. The Internet of Things The Internet of Things is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical machines, and digital machines that are able to transfer data over a network without needing human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. And the Internet of Things is now being used to help protect natural resources like water supplies and forests. Remote sensing and geographic information systems can help large-scale farmers and foresters to monitor and manage their practices for the better. For instance, the system can pinpoint trees that are old enough to harvest, and it can monitor soil quality and irrigation.Smart Technology Smart technology isn’t always good for the environment. For instance, a smart thermostat contributes to the consumption of electricity and, therefore, the mining of key elemental components. However, there is a plus side to smart technology. By using them wisely, smart devices can save energy because they regulate and improve the use of things like heat, water, and light. And items like smart refrigerators keep track of the food it contains, which prevents food wastage and keeps the number of car trips to the supermarket at a minimum. Electric Vehicles The world is waking up to the fact that mining fossil fuels are destroying the planet. In the last decade or two, there has been a significant increase in the production of electric vehicles, and some countries hope to change to electric transport in the near future completely. Electric vehicles are propelled by electric motors using energy that’s stored in rechargeable batteries, which means they do not produce carbon emissions. Direct Air Capture Technology The environmental technology known as Direct Air Capture is an ambitious and new idea. It pulls carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere and generates a concentrated stream of CO2 for utilization or sequestration. The air is then pushed through a filter where the CO2 is removed. However, DAC is only in the early stages of development at the moment.

The technologies from the 18th century up to the present day have damaged the earth in two primary ways: the depletion of natural resources and pollution.Resource depletion means using natural resources faster than they can be replenished. Types of resource depletion include deforestation, soil erosion, and fossil fuel and mineral mining. Air pollution comes from excessive gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitric oxide. Factories, power stations, mass agriculture, and others all contribute to air pollution. And air pollution leads to global warming and negative health impacts on people and animals. Water pollution has to do with the contamination of waters like rivers and oceans. Domestic waste, insecticides and pesticides, and industrial effluents all pollute the water.

As we have argued in the case of the social impact of technology, in the end, the environmental impact will depend not only on choices that we make as consumers, but on the social and political choices that we make collectively as citizens.

But it’s not just the companies creating technology that are responsible for its environmental impact; the impact is also determined by how we, the consumers, use that technology. Take driverless cars for example. Mile for mile, driverless cars could be much more efficient than human-driven cars: they’ll be able to optimise their routes, speed and acceleration for fuel efficiency, and reduce their air resistance by platooning. But if the convenience of driverless cars means that people start using them for journeys that they’d otherwise have made on foot, bike or public transport, that could lead to an overall increase in fuel use.

Another example is the use of AI to solve complex optimisation problems. DeepMind have already used AI to reduce the energy required to cool Google’s datacentres by 40%, and they were reported to be in talks with National Grid to use AI to better manage energy supply and demand. AI might even one day be used to design new materials that could be used in hardware components, thereby reducing our reliance on rare metals. Tech companies are also powerful advocates for renewable energy. As major consumers of electricity, it’s in their financial interest to encourage the generation of cheaper and more reliable forms of energy. As a result, they’ve spent millions of dollars lobbying on renewable energy issues, and many have declared public targets to power their businesses on 100% renewable energy.

t’s not all doom and gloom for tech’s green credentials though.  Indeed, there are many ways that technology – and technology companies – are helping to reduce our environmental impact on the planet.

As the price of Bitcoin continues its meteoric rise, few investors stop to worry about the environmental cost of maintaining the ever growing Bitcoin network. But there is a cost, and it’s enormous: Digiconomist estimates that the Bitcoin mining network now consumes more energy than the whole of Ireland. And it’s growing at about 30% a month. Unfortunately, much of the energy powering the network comes from fossil fuels.

Similarly, few people stop to think about the environmental cost of a Netflix binge. But storing and streaming all that digital content requires a lot of energy, and as consumers expect regular new content and ever better video quality, the energy demands spiral upwards. It’s not just Netflix of course. In total, data centres consume roughly 3% of the world’s energy supply, and this amount is estimated to treble in the next decade. However, perhaps the most concerning way that technology impacts our environment is through the mining of vast quantities of rare metals. Metals like lithium, cobalt and nickel are used to make critical hardware components – batteries in particular – for things like computers, smartphones and electric cars. Unfortunately, mining these metals is energy intensive and comes not just at an environmental cost, but often a terrible human cost too. Moreover, these rare metals are just that: rare. Without large investment in recycling facilities, using these limited natural resources is unsustainable. The planned obsolescence of consumer gadgets only exacerbates the problem.

Many of these issues come to a head with the health apps which have been widely used in Asia and are gradually being introduced in Europe to track an individual’s health status. 

“With the invasive way, you are affecting the experiment. You change the behaviour of people and you cannot trust the results,” he says.

However, he says there are apps that help citizens choose which data they share, leading to a more efficient tracking of the virus. “If people can decide themselves if they want to participate or not, then we have privacy-friendly alternatives. That’s a game changer.”

Still, assurances from officials and industry executives have done little to appease anxiety that privacy rights could be brushed aside as governments seek to use tools of mass surveillance in their efforts to combat the virus.

The use of location data to track the disease has been applied in Italy, Spain, Norway and Belgium, with the UK, Portugal and Greece set to follow.In cities such as Madrid and Milan, telecoms operators have created heat maps that show how restrictions on movement are working and what effect the presence of police on the streets is having on behaviour. 

“It is not a question of spying on everyone forever but of saving lives for a time that demands temporary rules,” he says. “We trust Uber to know everywhere we go, we trust Gmail with everything we write. If we don’t trust the NHS with our health data then who do we trust?”

But the use of such data to track the virus has triggered fears of growing surveillance

Thierry Breton, the former chief executive of France Telecom who is now the European commissioner for the internal market, has called on operators to hand over aggregated location data to track how the virus is spreading and to identify spots where help is most needed.