The real challenge for the environment is to use your new iPhone to order clothes online, pay them with bitcoins and after trying on the clothes at home, return them.
Last October the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) published a special report on the impacts of global warming which made many people rethink their own CO2 emissions. Should I quit eating meat? Give up my car? Skip a holiday in Asia?
On individual level, the change that people can do towards climate change is mainly symbolic. If you want real change, I suggest considering your smart phone.
Although the producers of these smartphones create a positive setting around their products, the fact is that smartphones and electronic communication (including online shopping, banking, streaming etc.) are not sustainable. Especially the young population favor actions which are even worse for the environment than flying.
Data servers and silos consume a lot of energy to produce cloud-based services. Watching tv is now spread to multiple devices. Streaming individually requires more technology and electricity than old televisions, which were used by the whole family together.
Online entertainment and news services are brought to you with electricity. Reading the news on your phone emits equally as much CO2 as printing the paper and delivering it to you. However, the only difference is that online the usage tends to be much higher as the information is easily available.
It might feel harmless to scroll through Facebook every now and then, but the biggest data center of Facebook produced almost 300 000 tons of CO2 emissions in 2017. Their electricity bill must be quite large, considering their yearly usage of electricity was 2.5 Giga watt hours.
However, the IT sector is still a small contributor to carbon dioxide emissions, but Greenpeace says the emissions are growing at least 13% a year.
Virtual currencies should be considered too. The Bitcoin network consumes more electricity than Ireland, and the CO2 emissions are equivalent to a million flights across the Atlantic – a flight, not a passenger.
Bitcoin mining is technically so simple, that it could be done with pen and paper. Therefore, the process of Bitcoin extraction is a deliberate waste of electricity because it makes currency counterfeiting more difficult.
The real environmental devil is online shopping. The goods are ordered overseas and inefficiently transported one by one to the door.
There is an enormous rally of airplanes, trucks and delivery vehicles transporting packages, in an attempt to satisfy consumers’ endless drive to buy. Who wouldn’t be overwhelmed when stores around the world open up and goods can be ordered cheaply from China?
The enjoyment from buying is very short-lived. The clothes are left in the dresser after being used once. Cheap fashion and small electronics are dumped in the trash, and the environment is the one to pay the bill.
It is so easy to return clothes to online shops, that people order five different styles and sizes of clothing and decide to keep maybe one. In online clothing shops, the percentage of returns is about 40%, when in other online stores it is 10-20%. The returned, new and unused clothes usually end up in trash, because the logistics and margins cannot handle recycling.
On top of this all, there is the need to buy new devices. The production requires silver and gold and rare earth metals.
No environmentally conscious buys the newest iPhone every year. Many young and trend-conscious people do exactly that, even though they have given up eating meat because of the environmental impact.
The real environmental bombshell is to order online clothing using the new iPhone, pay them with Bitcoins, and return everything after trying them on.
So, the next time you have a bad conscience when you choose a meal at a restaurant or when you buy a plane ticket for your next trip, think about whether you could offset emissions by reducing your use of cloud services and online stores. And maybe you don’t even need to upgrade to a new smart phone.
Resources:
http://theconversation.com/how-smartphones-are-heating-up-the-planet-92793
https://www.bluestardirect.com.au/myth-paper-has-a-high-carbon-footprint/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/580087/energy-use-of-facebook/
https://www.ashden.org/news/how-much-energy-does-it-take-to-check-facebook
https://www.shipbob.com/blog/ecommerce-returns/
