UN respect 50 million tonnes of e-waste is generated annually. These figures are due to the rapid advancement of technology, which makes devices obsolete faster and faster. Devices pollute not just at the end of their life, but throughout it. Internet access, streaming content reproduction or online information storage has a cost to the planet.
A single data center, a facility that houses the physical infrastructure for providing computing services to enterprises or in the cloud, consumes the equivalent of 50,000 homes.Scientific American'. That means the carbon footprint of all digital transportation is equivalent to 7% of the world's electricity. However, technology itself may be the key to limiting the impact of its developments on the environment. Carbon dioxide (CO2) capture, e-waste recycling or AI are some options to achieve this.
Renewable energies for the technology sector
Energy transition is a strategy that advocates replacing fossil fuels with more environmentally friendly ones. In this context, renewable energies are positioned as the energy of the future for sectors such as technology.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global data center consumption officer 10% between 2015 and 2021. Returning to the previous example, during that period the annual consumption of each center increased by the equivalent of the consumption of 5,000 additional households. For this reason, the data center industry has also become one Major buyers Long-term renewable energy purchase agreements (PPAs).
Through PPAs, technology companies ensure that the electricity consumed by their data centers is of renewable origin. Interxion Spain the mountain One of the largest PPAs in Europe to power four data centers in Spain with renewable energy for 10 years. With this measure alone, Interxion will avoid 8,000 tons of CO2 emissions per year. For their part, BBVA and Endesa signed a PPA in 2018, which ensures that all the energy consumed by the bank in Spain comes from renewable sources, mainly from wind farms.
But BPAs are not the only option. The amount of heat generated by data centers, for example, is an opportunity to heat water. Heta Startup used The idea is to create a network that connects computers to the boilers of homes registered in it. The network is capable of replacing an average daily consumption of 4.8KWh per household.
CO2 capture
An increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is one of the main ones Reasons Climate change. Therefore, it is important not only to reduce its emissions, but also to invest in technologies that reduce the concentration of this greenhouse gas (GHG). For this, CO2 capture and storage has been developed.
The technique “separates CO2 emitted by industrial and energy-related sources, transports it to a storage location, and long-term sequestration from the atmosphere,” He points Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). CO2 capture can be carried out after combustion (in factory or power plant chimneys) and directly from the air (in places with high CO2 concentrations).
Once captured, the gas is pressurized until it condenses or liquefies. This allows liquid CO2 to be transported to storage: microscopic rock formations found beneath the soil that prevent the gas from returning to the atmosphere.
Another option consists of reusing this captured gas in energy production. In particular, CO2 injected into the ground can be used for enhanced recovery in oil wells: liberation Extra crude oil. Although this may seem counterintuitive, experts point out that this procedure is better than the advanced recovery currently used.
Energy efficient technologies
Energy efficiency is the optimization of energy consumption to achieve a certain level of comfort and service. This is achieved in two ways: by adjusting electricity consumption to the actual needs of users or by taking measures to avoid energy losses.
For this, digitization is provided as one of the keys. This activity allows the company to monitor its operations and processes and adjust consumption according to its needs. In this sense, home automation plays an important role in energy efficiency, as it allows processes to be automated.
Apart from this, controlling a company's lighting or air conditioning is essential to improve its energy consumption. The use of smart lighting systems or Internet of Things (IoT) can help reduce electricity consumption.
In this sense, BBVA has installed cold aisles in its data centers, with the aim of making the cooling of its equipment more efficient. Through this measure, the bank avoids 1,500 tons of CO2 emissions per year and manages to reduce the consumption of its computer equipment by 32%.
Recycling of e-waste
E-waste is the largest source of solid waste in the world. warns World Health Organization (WHO). In addition to being a problem for the planet, it is also a problem for health, as improper burning or storage releases harmful substances such as lead, antimony or mercury. however, Only 17.4% is recycled.
In addition to its climate and health benefits, recovering materials from old equipment is more profitable than extracting virgin resources. To promote e-waste recycling, investments are being made in designing innovative solutions that use robotic and artificial intelligence (AI) systems, for example to automatically classify waste, which used to be manual. Biotechnology can also play an important role. In this regard, the use of microorganisms to recover gold and silver from electronic devices is being studied.
However, the first option covers the first step of the circular economy: the Reuse. Numerous startups dedicated to refurbishing electronic devices have been born in this space. MercadoIT, for example, buys, repairs, and sells or rents professional telecommunications and computer equipment to other companies. BBVA, for its part, entered the technology reuse market with support for Wiserentr, a pioneering solution for leasing electronic devices for individuals.
AI that controls AI consumption
AI requires a large amount of energy from its development and training to its final use. Although the exact size of their carbon footprint is not yet known, there already are Attempts to calculate it.
One of them is using AI itself to calculate its own impact on the environment. The Hucking Face Company estimated the emissions of its large Bloom language model using a software tool. With that, Bloom tracked emissions in real time for 18 days to create a global estimate. The result? 50 tons of CO2, 60 flights are equivalent between London and New York.
Although the study is recent and has not been peer-reviewed, the researchers hope this information can be a starting point so that “companies and researchers can consider how to develop large-scale language models to limit their carbon footprint.” Technological development may be responsible for the rise in emissions, but it may also be part of the solution to the problem.
