We all more or less know that we are heading towards destruction, while enjoying our comfortable lives and our fancy gadgets . What we may not know is that the end could be much closer than we thought.
A recent study confirmed that the huge amount of carbon footprint released due to smartphones could be killing our planet at an alarmingly fast rate.
This research, conducted by researchers at McMaster University and published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, analyzed the carbon footprint of the entire technology and communications industry from 2010 to 2020, including computers, laptops, smartphones and servers.
The results of this study were quite alarming. In 2007, ICT accounted for only 1% of the total carbon footprint. Now, this figure has already tripled and is growing rapidly, estimated to exceed 14% by 2040 – that’s half of the carbon impact caused by the entire transport sector worldwide!
A major reason behind this is the mining of rare earth minerals required to manufacture a new smartphone. It accounts for around 85% – 95% of a phone’s total CO2 emissions over its average two-year lifecycle.
This means that buying a new smartphone uses the same amount of energy as recharging and running your old one for ten years. So next time you should think twice before throwing away your old phone for a newer model.
Another notable finding was that smartphones with larger screen sizes tend to leave behind a larger carbon footprint than smaller ones. In fact, Apple has publicly revealed that making an iPhone 7 Plus produces around 10% more CO2 than the iPhone 6s.
Researchers also predicted that the future does not look good with the Internet of Things bombarding our lives with even more devices.
“If manufacturers do not quickly adopt 100% renewable energy practices, the emergence of IoT could dwarf the contribution of all other traditional computing devices and dramatically increase total global emissions far beyond the predictions of this study.”.
It's true that reducing our carbon footprint is beyond the ability of one person or one business, but we can take a significant step by keeping our old phones for another year when possible and reducing our own carbon footprint.
