IT worse than aviation for carbon emissions – nearly

According to a new report from an organisation called Global Action Plan the ICT sector is about to overtake the aviation industry when it comes to CO2 emissions (I hadn’t heard of them before now so I’m not vouching for their pedigree, but they look genuine).

There are more than one billion computers on the
planet, and the worldwide ICT sector is responsible
for around 2% of man made CO2 each year – a similar
figure to the global airline industry. In the UK, there are
an estimated 10 million office PCs; and ICT equipment
accounts for roughly 10% of the UK’s total electricity
consumption.

The ICT sector is growing at a faster rate than the
aviation industry. In 2006, 48% more data storage
capacity was sold than in the previous year, compared
to a 3% increase in UK air travel passengers in the same
period. The impact of the sector is starkly illustrated
through the following statistics.

• A medium-sized server has a similar carbon footprint
  to an SUV achieving 15 miles to the gallon.
  Servers also require as much energy to cool them
  as they directly consume.
• 1,000 PCs left on 24/7 without any power save
  settings activated will consume up to £70,000 of
  electricity per year and for every unit of electricity
  consumed, around another half unit is required to
  dissipate the heat generated.
• If 20% of European business travel was replaced by
  teleconferencing, around 25 million tonnes of CO2
  could be saved each year.
• In 1980 before the introduction of the PC, world office
  paper consumption averaged 70 million tonnes a year
  – by 1997 it had more than doubled to almost 150
  million tonnes.
• In the UK, 120 billion pieces of paper are printed
  every year, the manufacture of which emits 1.5
  million tonnes of CO2 before taking into account the
  impact of the manufacture of printing equipment and
  ink and the energy consumed by printers.
• Each year 125 million computers are taken out of
  circulation worldwide and most of these end up in
  landfill sites (a problem addressed by the introduction
  of the European WEEE directive in 2007).
• Manufacturing one PC requires 1.7 tonnes of raw
  materials and water and consumes over 10 times its
  own weight in fossil fuels.

Some interesting headline numbers there. headline numbers tend to make me skeptical though, I’m not entirely convinced by the growth parallel in the above extract – 48% more disk storage doesn’t need 48% more power. I’ve not had chance to read the whole report though, so it may be that the headlines mask the real detail.

I’m not saying that the problem isn’t real though. Today I am looking at a solution for a customer which will have huge amounts of redundancy because the service levels are very high. All of this redundancy will be consuming power all of the time, but delivering no value other than to be ready to take the load of the active servers. It could all be in some kind of “stand-by” mode, but the technology isn’t there to allow us to do it. It’s this kind of thing that we need to start resolving. There are a lot of things we could do, but there seems to be little urgency to get it done, even though initiatives like Energy Star have been running for a very long time.

What with this, the Child Benefit CD fiasco, and other major IT project problems we need to start getting our act together before we become completely demonised in the eyes of the British public. I also think that there is a growing  problem with people of my age experiencing work related health issues from 20+ years sat in front of a screen and keyboard. It reminds me a bit of the problems we have experienced with asbestos workers and could be just as expensive to fix.