> Total electricity use in America, for example, has been essentially flat for almost a decade. For decades prior to the Great Recession plastics consumption in the US grew more than 50 percent faster than the overall economy did, but since 2009 the situation has reversed, with plastic use growing almost 15 percent slower than the economy as a whole.
For most other natural resources, the rate of consumption growth hasn’t just slowed down; it’s actually gone negative. Year after year, America is now generally using less total steel, copper, gold, fertilizer, water, cropland, timber, paper, and other physical building blocks of an economy.
Does this trend stay if you look at global data instead of only the USA? The most obvious cause of the lowered resource need would IMO not be dematerialisation but outsourcing to other countries.
If all your factories are moved to China, you can certainly get yourself stellar environment ratings in the USA. However, this won't actually help the planet in any way.
"The true raw material footprint of nations" (2013)
...The study, involving researchers from UNSW, CSIRO, the University of Sydney, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, was published today in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It reveals that the decoupling of natural resources from economic growth has been exaggerated.
The results confirm that pressures on raw materials do not necessarily decline as affluence grows and demonstrates the need for policy-makers to consider new accounting methods that more accurately track resource consumption....
Did you misread the link from dredmorbius? I understood it to mean that the main argument made in the article, that economic growth has decoupled from resource usage, is false, and globalization is a big factor in this.
Ah, I overlooked that line, sorry. Of course a few details how they came to that conclusion would still be good, as the other commitments here are discussing.
> If all your factories are moved to China, you can certainly get yourself stellar environment ratings in the USA. However, this won't actually help the planet in any way.
It's actually better for the planet at least in terms of electricity since China is one of the very few countries to massively invest in Nuclear vs burning fossil fuel for energy production.
This is very far from the truth. Roughly 2% of the generation in China comes from nuclear, over 50% comes from coal. Are you perhaps thinking of France?
They're still building (hundreds of) coal plants too though in other countries as investments.
>China is building or planning more than 300 coal plants in places as widely spread as Turkey, Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Egypt and the Philippines.
The trend described in this article was written about by Buckminster Fuller in 1938, except he called it ephemeralization [1].
Paul Graham wrote an essay on the same subject (iphones and ephemeralization) in 2010 and, unlike this piece, made reference to Fuller's early identification of the trend. [2]
Im my opinion, ephemeralization is a better descriptor of the trend than dematerialization. Bucky was an extremely careful user of language, to the point of coining his own words when he didn't feel any existing words served his purpose. I think he was right to not use dematerialization to describe the trend because it is manufacturing where you are not removing material (dematerializing it), rather you are simply not using it, or using less of it, in the first place.
I'm not real happy with either of the two. They both have connotations that are irrelevant: "ephemeral" tends to mean brief/transitory, while any negation of "material" leans toward either non-existence or "not-mattering."
There's already a 90s-origin term that considers this same phenomenon, in the same context, and addresses it in the way we want it to: virtual. Software on phones "virtualizes" our clocks/cameras/etc. Wired of all publications should remember that one. Actually maybe they're explicitly avoiding it after spending years saying "virtual" seemingly every 3rd or 4th word!
Virtualization has helped immensely in many ways to reduce resources used and to eliminate costs.
People used to buy books, games, music, movies, in addition to clocks, cameras and others you mention in a physical form but now are moving to virtual products. Many products are virtual now from play/entertainment to work/administrative (file cabinets, storage, etc). Just looking at my own purchases, most are virtual when they used to fill book shelves, cabinets and trash bins eventually.
Ultimately virtual goods will help solve, and is helping solve resources used, while allowing growth. Lots of pushing resources previously was about getting to that growth metric, growth can now happen, and even in greater numbers exponentially in virtual worlds like apps, games, movies, offices, government, businesses and more.
Virtual goods have also helped 'clean up' areas like many think the crime reduction after the 90s was the result of some policy, but ultimately it was the internet that cleaned it up and reduced crime. People are indoors, more aware, more access to information that they need/want. Even Times Square cleanup was attributed to oversight, when in actuality the porn went online which led to less crime and less out in the open products.
Virtual goods and products moving this way is helping us not just to dematerialize, but move to virtual resources that are bits on a disk not physical content, bookshelves and cabinets.
>By one estimate, a data-hungry user’s smartphone can consume as much electricity in a year as her fridge does.
Bull-fucking-shit. At minimum a refrigerator uses 150 watts and averages over 200. In comparison, a flagship gaming smartphone with an overclocked SoC like the Asus ROG phone uses 3.8 watts while benchmarking. Nobody with two brain cells to rub together could be stupid enough to think a phone uses more power than a goddamn refrigerator. The fact the author treats that as a serious possibility should make you question the credibility of every single thing they've ever written.
> At minimum a refrigerator uses 150 watts and averages over 200.
That's only when the compressor is running though, which it only does when the temperature is above the setting. For a well-insulated modern refrigerator, that is far from continuously. In an unheated space in a cold climate it would be rare. In a heated space the net effect of installing the refrigerator may be to slightly reduce energy consumption because you end up partially heating the space with a high efficiency heat pump rather than a less efficient resistive or oil/gas based heating system.
Obviously it isn't the typical case, but a refrigerator consuming less net power than a phone is a thing that can happen under some circumstances that actually occur in real life.
From the first google result I came across, "A typical fridge of about 400-500 litres can use around 495kWh of electricity each year".
So what you are talking about is very atypical result.
My phone has a 4Ah battery, which typically would last me two days. Since it runs at 5V, that's 0.02*182 = 3.65kWh per year. So it's 136 times less than the typical fridge.
My phone would also be heating the house with it's inefficiency.
> From the first google result I came across, "A typical fridge of about 400-500 litres can use around 495kWh of electricity each year".
The problem with "typical" is that the variance is high. It's even worse than that in hot climates with air conditioning because not only does the refrigerator compressor have to run more, it's pumping heat into a space that then causes the air conditioner to run more.
So the average isn't very informative without knowing where you are in relation to it. The difference in the numbers between Colorado and Florida is dramatic.
> My phone would also be heating the house with it's inefficiency.
Only if you leave it at home instead of taking it with you when you go outside.
>Only if you leave it at home instead of taking it with you when you go outside.
Well it's charging overnight. My phone is inside the house probably half the time. Honestly this is a really silly argument. If we cared about the extra heating from fridges then we would put them outside in hot climates.
If we're talking about a hundred phones versus a fridge, it might be comparable.
I take your point about hot climates but I still think any comparison about power usage between a phone and a fridge is ridiculous and draws into question the credibility of the writer.
More than two orders of magnitude. You put a refrigerator in an environment where the outside temperature is below its set temperature and it doesn't run at all, or one where 100% of its power use displaces less efficient heating methods and its net consumption is negative. By contrast in a high exterior temperature environment it never stops running and can cost in excess of $1000/year in energy. Or anywhere in the full range in between.
> Well it's charging overnight. My phone is inside the house probably half the time.
So in a cold climate it has no energy cost when it's indoors, but does the rest of the time. Meanwhile the refrigerator is inside all the time, and is a heat pump which is more efficient at heating than the phone which is equivalent to resistive heating.
> Honestly this is a really silly argument. If we cared about the extra heating from fridges then we would put them outside in hot climates.
Then the air conditioner runs less but the refrigerator runs more because it's cooling against a higher exterior temperature. That might be more efficient but not by a lot. It's still going to result in high energy consumption.
> If we're talking about a hundred phones versus a fridge, it might be comparable.
If the question is can a refrigerator use less net power per year than one phone, the answer is yes. Not always, not even usually, but it can actually happen in places like Maine or Canada.
> I take your point about hot climates but I still think any comparison about power usage between a phone and a fridge is ridiculous and draws into question the credibility of the writer.
It's a widespread rhetorical device in the media. State something which is technically true but generally misleading in support of your point. Then the statement is defensible from a pedantic technical perspective but still causes people who don't know better to come to inaccurate conclusions. It's basically motte and bailey:
The problem isn't that the claim is factually inaccurate, it's that it's purposely misleading. It's the difference between incompetence and malice. Not to say that either of them is commendable, but if we're going to be pedantic about things then let's see it through.
The average iPhone, according to Mills’ calculations, uses about 361 kW-h a year once the wireless connections, data usage and battery charging are tallied up.
So if we are going to account for all of the things making my smartphone possible as consuming electricity, I think we should account for all of the things associated with running my refrigerator such as the energy it takes to make the food I want to store and the refrigerated trucks it took to get to me.
The power utilisation of a refrigerator scales at best poorly with the quantity of food moved through it, unlike a smartphone (door openings is a far greater predictor), and human food consumption is generally constrained (1800-3200 kcal/day per person, more or less), whilst data appetites both vary and have grown markedly.
You do raise a good point that behind msny. products is a long chain of either embedded manufacturing or complementary products costs. But the avoidable costs of food vs. data (refrigerated or not, people need food to eat; we'd survived 200,000 years before iOS) argues against your comparison.
That's a false equality. Counting food would be analogous to counting the energy used to build the apps. The fact that a fridge has less features that require additional power draw don't detract from the point.
Going from that link to the atkearney report, I tend to interpret that the 19.1 kW/h per GB of data as data centre cost. If that’s the case, it would not be correct to use it to calculate per phone consumption.
The 1GB of data cost is sunk cost, whether it’s accessed by one or a million. On the other hand, if we only had one smartphone in this world, we wouldn’t be storing zettabytes for it to access :)
More suitable numbers were 3.5 kW/h for the phone, and 23.4 kW/h for each connection. So, phone consumption should more accurately be 23.4 + 3.5 + (19.1 * total world storage / total world smartphone) !
The majority of data heavy stuff also tends to happen in WiFi environments. So I dont know where this 300x overhead increase is supposed to come from. A typical 3G base station is burning 500W/h no matter what data usage is.
So unless you share you wireless cell with less than 5 people this should be magnitudes below a fridge. The wired part of the infrastructure is much more efficient and aggregated in general.
I suppose the biggest culprut are not even the smarthones, but their cloud storage services, which are completely optional and not used to a large extent by the majority of smartphone users.
Most of all ISP profits and subscription costs would also be
decisively lower/higher if energy use and therefore cost was supposedly that significant.
It reminds me about reading articles about a topic of which I'm an expert. First I notice all the errors and then I realize that every article must be like this to their domain experts.
Even that can be misleading though. OP missed the fact the energy usage estimate included energy used to provide services to the phone as well.
It’s a big problem with evaluating news articles. They’re not journals and you can’t be sure what they are knowingly summarising and what they are over simplifying or obscuring and why. Definitely worth keeping a critical stance though.
>OP missed the fact the energy usage estimate included energy used to provide services to the phone as well.
Except those services don't exist in a vacuum. Presenting that power usage as if it is just stacked on top of the usage of a person without a phone is gross misrepresentation. Time spent on a phone is time not spent on a television, on a desktop pc, on a games console, driving a vehicle to some other distraction like a movie theater or amusement park. Except for the printed word a smartphone is among the least energy intensive ways to entertain a human being and I put forth that using one results in a reduction, not an increase, in overall energy use and carbon footprint compared to a person without one.
I also agree that this estimate is way off, but I think the idea is to think of the total energy use of the phone when you include the energy used by the servers that provide the services you use in apps. That is much harder to measure. Luckily Google, Facebook and Twitter invest a lot in energy saving at their data centers so it's one of the leanest ways of using compute power. I think that even when you put that energy into the equation, it's still nowhere near a refrigerator.
If you do that you have to include the energy savings from the phone use as well. The television that isn't turned on, the desktop computer that isn't running, the drive to the movie theater that didn't happen. I'd bet dollars to donuts that smartphone use reduces an individual's overall energy consumption.
Perhaps the author was quoting a statistic that includes electricity requirements of the datacenters and infrastructure to power the phone. Perhaps not, but that would be an interesting statistic.
Yes that must be what the statistic represents since it emphasises data heavy users.
It would be interesting to do some back if the envelope calculations based on energy usage of Google and Facebook datacenters, percentage of content consumed on phones and data consumed by average vs heavy users.
Reminds me of how every year when a new and incrementally improved phone is released, the phone company shills and morons claim that the camera is so revolutionary, it's almost as good as an SLR.
Yeah, pros and enthusiasts are so ill-informed that they continue to lug around their bulky 5kgs and $5k worth of camera/lens, when it could all be replaced by the latest plastic iCrap and its revolutionary 5mm lens.
The article talks about energy and resource consumption in the US, but production of most electronics happens in China, whos emissions are exploding. Energy used in production of electronics is often greater than the energy consumed during the entire lifetime of a device [1].
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I don't use AdBlock. I even consent to some tracking, because I know economics have forced these websites to resort to such things and I want to support them, but apparently this isn't good enough for Wired. Oh, but ads loaded anyway I see.
Yea, maybe they have helped but I don't think they are doing as much as they could do for the planet. I wish they would do more so their products are as close to 100% recyclable as possible. Their relenting push towards upgrades for-profit can't be good for the planet.
>I wish they would do more so their products are as close to 100% recyclable as possible.
Recyclability fundamentally does not matter. If we eventually run out of aluminium or cobalt or whatever else, we can use landfills as mineral mines when that becomes economically viable.
What we really need to care about right now is CO2 emissions; in that respect, smartphones represent exceptionally good value. Including the energy used to charge it, an iPhone Xs results in 70kg of CO2 emissions over its lifespan. The average American produces 16,500kg of CO2 per year.
A smartphone feels like it should be really bad for the environment, because it's expensive and shiny and new. It actually does less damage to the environment than half a tank of gasoline or a few meaty meals. Turning down your thermostat by 2 degrees feels insignificant, but it could save as much as 1,000kg of CO2 per year.
> we can use landfills as mineral mines when that becomes economically viable.
Is economics really the primary obstacle standing in the way of "mining" landfills? I've never been to one, but just trying to imagine it, I'd would be a hell of a lot more worried about diseases, toxins, and all the other awful stuff that ends up in landfills one way or another and that would stand in the way of separating the materials you want effectively/efficiently/cleanly/etc... the economics seem like the last concern.
Why I agree smartphones should be recyclable, I'm not sure it's important in the larger scheme of things. A phone is a very small item, relatively speaking and even at its height, the upgrade cycle was only once every 12 months.
Now consider the sheer volume of trash — paper, plastic, foil, fumes, food, etc. — many individuals and organisations throw out every day. It essentially defies comprehension, but it's a lot. So much that's we've created an incredible reverse supply-chain to get it all out of sight and out of mind as quickly as possible, with the result that we rarely stop to think just how much crap we're all generating.
Set against this, people throwing out a tiny electronic item, even an item containing some nasty toxic stuff inside it, is a very small problem. Smartphones are novel and make for a high-profile target, but the real problem is the more mundane avalanche of detritus that accompanies modern civilisation.
>Set against this, people throwing out a tiny electronic item, even an item containing some nasty toxic stuff inside it, is a very small problem.
It's a very large problem. In the 2017 fiscal year, Apple sold 216.76 million iPhones. Now factor in all the other manufacturers, and all the other years. Remember each one usually comes with a charging plug, a cable, some sort of earbuds, excessive showy packaging...
>At present, approx. 4–5% of world production of gold, silver and copper, as well as even up to 20% of world production of palladium and cobalt, are currently used for their production
That is in regards to smartphones in 2013, it's almost certainly higher now. In a random smarphone you are likely to find most, if not all, of the following: opper, nickel, silver, gold, platinum group metals, cobalt, lithium, lead, tin, zinc, rare earth metals, gallium, indium, iron, chromium, niobium, tantalum, titanium.
I've been thinking about electroinc waste a lot lately and I'm starting to think it is the reason why the universe is so quiet. Species don't destroy themselves in wars, I think they have development cycles similar to us where in a century or two they burn through a massive amount of their resources. They burn fossil fuels and negatively change their environment, they create plastics and negatively change their environments, they largely deplete the elements they require to make advanced technologies and end up with landfills full of personal electronic deices before they reach a point where they are mining asteroids and starting interstellar travel to continue to have adequate resources for general construction and manufacturing of technology.
Apple is the only mobile device company I know of that has a recycling program, and builds hardware free of most common pollutants / toxic substances; they’ve built machinery specifically to disassemble their phones.
If the other top two vendors would just achieve the same, we’d be in a much more comfortable position.
That sounds very nice, but there are scarce details on what makes them environmentally responsible, no mention of arsenic-free or mercury-free displays for example. I imagine it’s hard to affect any change to upstream suppliers when you don’t have volume.
For most other natural resources, the rate of consumption growth hasn’t just slowed down; it’s actually gone negative. Year after year, America is now generally using less total steel, copper, gold, fertilizer, water, cropland, timber, paper, and other physical building blocks of an economy.
Does this trend stay if you look at global data instead of only the USA? The most obvious cause of the lowered resource need would IMO not be dematerialisation but outsourcing to other countries.
If all your factories are moved to China, you can certainly get yourself stellar environment ratings in the USA. However, this won't actually help the planet in any way.