The Invisible Waste
The article is a hypothetical story created to spread awareness of the most neglected, invisible waste of the century.
Alina is a high school student, who is highly environmentally conscious. She makes sure she adopts and also encourages her friends to adopt environment-friendly measures for any chores they are up to.
Today is Alina's Birthday and she decides to throw a party at a nearby resort.
Isn't that exciting already?
She and all her friends enjoy the day thoroughly. They only use recyclable items at the party, like paper plates, paper bags, etc. She makes sure she does no harm to the environment and celebrates her birthday as naturally as possible.
They click a million photos of their celebration and promise to upload them to the cloud so that it is convenient for them to download from wherever they are. Owing to their high-quality photos they consumed multi gigs of their personal cloud storage.
Doesn't this story sound familiar to you?
Of Course! We have a minimum of two such events per month and we do the same all the time. We either store the photos in the cloud or put those up on our social media and leave aside the hundreds of photos we clicked.
Now imagine a billion others doing the same throughout the world!
Seems pretty normal right?
Alina wraps up her birthday and receives a call from her mentor, whom she describes her entire day.
The next portion of the article is the conversation between Alina and her mentor on a burning environmental invisible waste.
Mentor: Wow! You seem to have enjoyed a lot and also captured each possible moment of your birthday.
Alina: That's true. We are also not wasting any paper by printing the photos and also not buying excess storage devices to store it all in this way.
Mentor: Yes you are right. It is in the cloud and we are not wasting any hardware. However, have you ever thought about what is cloud and where our data keeps floating? Obviously, it is not the literal clouds, right?
Alina: Aaahh. I think Google stores it with them. Right?
Mentor: Partially yes. It is not only Google but a lot of companies have data centers for storing your cloud data. The point is someone stores it with them. Right?
Alina: Right. Someone must store the cloud data. But I am not able to establish the connection as to how it is more harmful in any way than paper print.
Mentor: Okay. When you store your photos on your phone or laptop, don't you need to power that up for viewing or operating?
Alina: Obviously, I need to charge my devices sometimes even multiple times a day i.e. I either run my phone on battery or directly on power.
Mentor: So don't you think the amount of data you store in your cloud storage ( either in Google photos or Social media ) is stored in some device that needs a lot of power to operate without delays?
Alina: Of course, it should require something to power.
Mentor: Those devices are called data servers which are in the form of gigantic rooms(even bigger than aircraft carriers called data centers) of computers or circuits that are racked row upon row which run continuously and draw a lot of power i.e. it is a massively huge infrastructure that is supporting all this storage and its operation.
We as individuals contribute a negligible percent of the storage. It is mostly the giant IT firms who require to store a lot of user data. Nevertheless, we need to be aware that each photo we store or post on social media contributes some amount.
There was a report by Greenspector where they studied several social media apps and found some really interesting conclusions like if we spend around two hours on our phone daily on apps like Tik Tok, Facebook, etc., it is equivalent to taking over a kilometer drive on a light vehicle or if we use Tik Tok (up to 52 minutes per day), we will consume nearly 149 GB per month only for that app.
Alina: Woah! This is huge if we consider the number of social apps we have on our phones. So, How do I term this type of waste, and since it is mostly invisible how or when can we quantify it as a waste?
Mentor: This type of waste is formally called Digital Waste. According to the website revolutionized.com, Digital waste is data waste, the long-term effects of storing vast amounts of information in a digital format - whether that information is raw data, processed data, idle, or in use.
Ofcourse, the sources of digital waste are not limited to the data we store, there are a lot of other sources of carbon emissions by digital waste like bitcoin mining and training data-intensive AI models, but for this discussion let's stick to our direct data contribution.
Alina: Hmm. Got it.
Mentor: Lotfi Belkhir is an associate professor of engineering at McMaster University, Canada. In a conversation with CNBC, he told that the cumulative use of millions of smartphones day to day is driving demand for bigger with even more complicated software and apps, and more rigorous infrastructure to manage that load.
A Stanford Graduate was asked about an individual's energy usage to which he answered that for every 100 gigabytes of data you save and store in the cloud, you generate around 0.2 tons of carbon dioxide every year, which is ofcourse not significant until the entire mankind does so multiple times.
For individual data center operations, there are miles of fiber optic cables, studded with other fixtures of internet infrastructure that all require power along the way which for many firms is energy generated by fossil fuels.
Alina: Oh that's really dangerous when I think about the amount of power drawn by burning fossil fuels. On the contrary, I also believe that big companies need to store huge amounts of data to run their company and services smoothly, which can be in the form of user data or sometimes even some research loggings. These are important to store although it draws a lot of power.
Mentor: Yes, there are some important and sensitive data that the companies have to store but also they can optimize this storage, which is lacking and not regulated by most IT firms. Also adopting renewable energy will cause much less harm to the environment.
The good part is climate initiatives are starting to be at the forefront of many corporates now. There are a number of country-specific certifications for building 'green' or sustainable data centers. Some countries also incentivize 'green data centers' through tax breaks.
Alina: Absolutely, adopting renewable energy will put much less stress on the environment than the dangerous burning of fossil fuels.
I think now I have an idea now about how much data a data center needs to process, thinking about the amount of cloud-dependent apps we use in our daily lives and how power-hungry that infrastructure must be.
Mentor: Absolutely. Your individual uploads in that sense make close to no contribution, but it is very important to be aware of this.
Alina: Aaah. I was also wondering that our phones and laptops heat up as we use them for a longer time, so how do the data servers don't overheat and burn out? Don't they need any cooling?
Mentor: I was coming to this point. The climate harm gets even worse from here on. Our phones and laptops have some pretty nice and decent inbuilt cooling facility that runs some fan inside the device when it overheats. The same applies to the data servers. The difference is they are cooled by air conditioning and not fans. There is a whole facility of cooling outside the servers to keep your data safe.
Alina: I think now I get your point. Air conditioning releases a lot of greenhouse gases, which are again reliant on fossil fuels for electricity. These affect the environment harshly and instigate climate change and eventually climate extremes.
Mentor: Exactly! According to studies, around 40 percent of the total energy that data centers consume goes to cooling IT equipment. Thus, there are a lot of investments as well as infrastructure involved in the cooling facilities, which makes colder countries a much better choice for setting up data centers. However, due to many country-sensitive data storage, these data centers are not limited to colder countries.
Ray Walsh, a digital privacy expert at ProPrivacy.com says that the environmental impact caused by data centers doesn't stop at electrical consumption. Coolants are often made of hazardous chemicals, and battery backups at data centers - needed when there are power shortages - cause an environmental impact both due to mining for battery components and the disposal of the toxic batteries afterward.
Alina: That scares me already. Why isn't anyone raising their voice against this?
Mentor: They are. In fact, a lot of companies including Google are using renewable energy such as wind, hydro, or solar to power data centers partially for powering their data centers. There are developers who use a lot of newer technologies including several AI-driven solutions to optimize the raw data coming from users to store it as effectively as possible to reduce operating costs and also work on upgrading technology to improve the operating temperature.
Certain IT firms are still not transparent about the source of power for their data centers. However, change is happening.
In a video, I saw a very interesting deduction where they stated that had IT been a country, it would have been ranked third after China and USA in power consumption. So you can now estimate how intense it is.
Alina: Sure. It is truly intense. I never thought about this indirect and invisible waste impacting climate change even existed.
Mentor: Digital Waste is becoming a huge unattended problem in today's world. We as individuals can also contribute to lessen the effect by optimizing our storage. If a billion around the world optimizes their part, it would definitely clear a lot of clutter and clean at least some digital waste.
Alina: Would you like to suggest something to individuals?
Mentor: Ofcourse. According to Forbes Magazine, Every engagement with the digital world creates waste, from the emails we send to the videos we stream. The energy required for just one internet search will result in the emissions of 0.2 grams of carbon. It doesn't sound like much, but an office of 100 people searching 50 terms a day will generate 250kg of carbon a year.
But you can surely do small changes to clear at least your unnecessary junk cloud data.
Clear the unnecessary emails, tweets, and social media posts. There are surely quite a few of them that you never want to see again. In fact, Facebook has introduced a facility to delete posts in bulk.
Delete the duplicate 100 photos you have stored and forgotten long back.
Shut down unused electrical peripherals and unplug your mobile chargers when you are not charging as they still draw some power even when not in use.
Store only what is necessary for the drive.
Unsubscribe from irrelevant newsletters and have a face-to-face conversation whenever possible.
Take part in digital waste regulatory movements and awareness campaigns so that the storage centers are regulated about what to and what not to use for the protection of the environment.
Just clear your online dirt as much as possible.
Alina: I surely would clear my part of clutter and save the planet from this invisible waste. This learning is the best birthday gift I could have.
References
Thought provoking, in a very serious way, great job!!