The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1477-996X.

htm

JICES 9,2

EDITORIAL

Even greener IT
Bringing green theory and green IT together, or why concern about greenhouse gasses is only a starting point
N. Ben Fairweather
Centre for Computing & Social Responsibility, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to look at current practices and associated consumption patterns in information technology (IT), looking at how impacts of IT, for good and ill, will be evaluated by green theory. Design/methodology/approach The paper takes an interdisciplinary approach drawing together literatures from a variety of elds, including green theory, information systems, green economics, computing, energy studies, cultural studies, waste management, and transport research. Findings Feedback effects that cause early replacement of software and hardware form a complex, environmentally harmful, vicious circle that can appropriately be called the upgrade treadmill. Considering wider impacts of IT suggests that imperatives to renovate, rather than replace, hardware are stronger than narrower considerations of green IT would suggest, and there is a responsibility on those involved in the academic disciplines associated with training future IT professionals to try to work against the upgrade treadmill. Originality/value This paper is novel in exposing green IT to green theory. In doing so, it seeks to move consideration of green IT onto a more rounded basis. Keywords Communication technologies, Global warming, Consumer behaviour Paper type Literature review

68

Journal of Information, Communication & Ethics in Society Vol. 9 No. 2, 2011 pp. 68-82 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1477-996X DOI 10.1108/14779961111158702

Introduction There has been an awareness for well over a decade that the environmental impacts of computing and information technology (IT)[1] are signicant (Fairweather, 1998, pp. 127-8). It has taken quite some time, though, for this to get any widespread acknowledgement. In the meantime, vast numbers of computers have been manufactured and used, each with its attendant environmental consequences. There has been a considerable increase in the number of IT devices possessed by the well-to-do in the richest parts of the world (or provided by employers for their exclusive use). IT devices have achieved a remarkable penetration across the less-industrialised parts of the world. Meanwhile, there is reason to think that In the computer industry [. . .] life cycles are getting shorter (Kawa and Golinska, 2010, p. 292). As this process has gone on, magnifying the environmental impacts of IT, more people have become aware of those environmental impacts of IT. Concern about greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions has moved from being a matter for activists and the scientically literate through to being a real concern for the bulk of large-scale businesses and organisations in the industrialised world. Thus, we have reached a situation where many large-scale organisations are

looking to reduce, or at least control, their GHG emissions. They see green IT as part of the answer, especially since measures to control GHG emissions also (almost always) reduce power consumption and lower costs, which may actually provide stronger reasons for the business to use green IT practices (Murugesan, 2008, p. 26). Greenness In these decades closest to the turn of the twenty-rst century, a previous diversity of green concern[2] has become very largely concentrated on concerns about GHG emissions and their association with anthropogenic climate change, to such an extent that the denition of green IT is said by thoughtful commentators to be about what directly reduces the carbon footprint (ONeill, 2010, p. 4). There should be no scope for doubt from that source and others (Murugesan, 2008, p. 24; Kurp, 2008, p. 11; Ghose et al., 2010, p. 113) that green IT includes consideration of carbon footprints and GHG emissions. While it is not controversial that greenness includes concerns about GHG emissions as a signicant part of its agenda, this is not because there is seen to be anything intrinsically valuable about the climate being in one state rather than another. Rather, concern about climate change is motivated by a set of underlying values (Kamminga, 2008, p. 674), that is set out, albeit to a limited extent, in the following section. Broader greeness If we could achieve truly carbon-neutral computing, would it be green? Leaving aside doubts about carbon offsetting, are we bothered about the impacts of mineral extraction, of air and water pollution from production facilities? Or, to put it more broadly, what does it mean to be green? I cannot attempt, or give, a full, justied, answer to that: to do justice to it would need tens of thousands of words and take us well outside the scope of the journal. I can, however, sketch some conclusions from earlier analysis (Fairweather, 1996, pp. 115-89), and slightly update them. In doing so, I do not seek to downplay the concern about GHG emissions, and about climate change among green advocates; but rather I seek to place it in a broader context, where concern about anthropogenic climate change does not dene greenness, but is one of a number of conclusions drawn by considering how certain values interact with evidence of the impacts of human behaviour. Greenness is about seeking wellbeing for all (Barry, 2008, p. 10)[3] in a way that is compatible with consideration of the long-term impacts (Barry, 2008, p. 8), the impacts on members of other species, on ecosystems (Markvart, 2009, p. 72) and on wilderness (Fletcher, 2009, pp. 169-70, 173) (or, more plausibly, on naturalness). The consideration of the long-term thus implies a considerable, deep seated, opposition to practices of resource extraction and waste disposal that cannot be sustained over millennia (Gibson and Hassan, 2005, pp. 103-5): thus green thinking uses the word sustainable in a very different way from the non-green politician or economist, who would consider an economic recovery to be sustainable if there was a prospect of it lasting a few decades (MRS Bulletin, 2011, p. 88). In advocating wellbeing within greenness a view of wellbeing is considered that explicitly denies that it can be equated with conventional nancial or economic analyses of wellbeing (Barry, 2008, p. 10). These are rejected, inter alia because they have a tendency to confuse the invaluable with the value-less, generally only including resources in calculations in so far as they are traded on markets[4] (Greenwood, 2007, p. 81).

Even greener IT

69

JICES 9,2

70

Economic analyses of wellbeing are rejected because they are pre-disposed to value the enjoyment one extra dollar can buy a rich man as equivalent to the misery one extra dollar might spare a slum-dweller who works by scavenging unsorted refuse on a tip: both would be counted as one dollars benet (Mandel, 2010). Economic analyses of wellbeing are rejected because they either do not consider long-term impacts[5] or discount them so that impacts in the long-term have a negligible effect on current consideration (Kennet and Heinemann, 2006, p. 96). Relevant is also the distinction between green pursuit of wellbeing and economic pursuit of meeting demand: to a green, it is immediately obvious that not all that is demanded is desirable. To a green, an economy that meets more demand for cigarettes, or cocaine, is not better than one that has lower demand for them. Another element to greenness that might not be obvious from that description is a preference for localism in economic activity (Pepper, 2005, p. 11). It can be derived in large part from concern for wellbeing and long-term impacts, because fuel use in transport is not sustainable, and resources used in that way are not available for more direct contributions to wellbeing. It is also derived from an opposition to the resource extraction[6] (Huang, 2008, pp. 45-6), inequalities of pay rates[7], and differences in pollution standards (Clarke, 2010)[8] that drive a lot of the economic advantage that leads to production and consumption being spread far from each other. It might be that this broader green agenda is not swallowed whole. However, to make claims about what is, or is not, green (and in our case what is, or is not, green IT) without understanding these elements of the meaning of greenness as understood in green theory would lead to a distorted and incomplete analysis. So, on a more comprehensive denition of greenness than just GHG emissions (although certainly including them in consideration), how does IT do? What are the main worries? Are there possible concerns and considerations that we can dismiss? Environmental impacts of IT In what follows, I consider the environmental impacts of computing and IT of all sorts: it is my intention to include personal, business, embedded, and mobile computing. As already noted, much is made of the association of IT with GHG emissions, and thus the connection with climate change. Thus, for example Somavat et al. (2010, p. 141) suggest that using computing devices[9] accounts for 3 per cent of global energy use. While energy use does not equate precisely with environmental impacts, such a large proportion of electricity generation is still at the cost of GHG emissions, that gures for energy use are, in this context, a meaningful proxy for GHG emissions[10]. However, this may signicantly underestimate the size of the total impact, since it has been argued, in a widely cited study, that the bulk of life cycle energy use for many computers is in production, not operation (Williams, 2004, p. 6173). Other studies suggest use impacts for energy and global warming can be considered to be at least as important as those of materials and manufacturing (James and Hopkinson, 2009, p. 38), but agree that materials and manufacturing energy consumption is highly signicant. Production With a degree of understatement Kurp (2008, p. 13) points out that:
It is not unusual [. . .] for companies to replace their older computers with new, more energy efcient ones in an effort to become more earth-friendly. This practice might not always be the most environmental solution.

Replacing older equipment with new, more efcient models, is a common proposal of government and industry wishing to promote economic activity, but one which is often of dubious worth as a way of reducing carbon emissions (Sachs, 2009). Such plausibility as it has as a green measure, depends on identication of greenness with concern about GHG emissions, rather than a broader view of greenness. Its instinctive appeal is considerably reduced when the environmental costs of production are signicant compared to the differentials in energy consumption, and the environmental costs associated. Since there is meaningful debate about whether or not lifetime use accounts for more environmental impacts of IT than production does (James and Hopkinson, 2009, p. 38), replacing older equipment with new, more efcient models will only in rare circumstances produce environmental benets. The simplest truth is that computer production accounts for substantial environmental impacts (James and Hopkinson, 2009, p. 7). It might be hard to understand why at rst: after all, the hardware is small, and how can so much environmental impact be embodied in something so small? But:
[. . .] to retrieve 4 grams of gold from a surface mine some 10 tonnes of rock has to be moved to retrieve 1 tonne of ore, which is then crushed, leached and further processed (van Holsteijn en Kemna, 2005, p. 47).

Even greener IT

71

The amount of gold in a computer may well be considerably less than 4 grams, but then the amount of energy required to crush even a single kilo of rock implies signicant carbon emissions. While other raw materials used in a computer can be obtained without quite such extreme costs, the amount of processing required, especially when the raw materials are rened to higher purities than for other uses, requires substantial energy use (Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, 2008), and produces signicant waste by-products including air and water pollution (Mazurek, 2003, pp. 56-7). These waste by-products and pollution can be assessed as being implicated in harms inconsistent with green concerns for wellbeing for all, and about impacts on other species and on ecosystems; while the energy used in raw material extraction and processing is a signicant factor behind GHG emissions. In 2006, restrictions on hazardous substances (RoHS) regulations were implemented in the European Union and Japan (Kawa and Golinska, 2010, p. 292). This bans the placing on the EU market of new electrical and electronic equipment containing more than agreed levels of lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyl (PBB) and polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) ame retardants (National Measurement Ofce, 2010?). Such restrictions can reasonably be expected to reduce the amount of pollution associated with their inclusion in IT hardware, while making recycling less dangerous. By contrast, the impact on GHG emissions can be expected to be insubstantial[11]. Thus, the RoHS regulations serve broader green theory more than narrow interpretations of greenness[12], and those narrowly focussed on GHG emissions will have difculty understanding their relationship to green IT. Disposal and recycling Disposal and recycling comprise only a relatively small proportion of the lifecycle energy impact of IT (James and Hopkinson, 2009, pp. 29, 33). However, there can be signicant impacts from pollution by electronic waste (Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, 2010). These may be substantially mitigated by adequate recycling. The European Union Waste

JICES 9,2

72

Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (Directive 2002/96/EC) requires that importers, re-branders and manufacturers of electrical and electronic equipment make provision for the recovery and appropriate recycling treatment of products of the time they import, rebrand or manufacture (Environment Agency, 2011). However, the evidence is that a substantial portion of the e-Waste that should be appropriately recycled and treated, but is not being, ends up in India or China (ONeill, 2010, p. 53), recycled by the informal sector, where numerous waste recycle workers are hired at extremely low wages applying crude and pollutive recycling methods for separation of reusable components and quick recovery of contained metals (Chi et al., 2011, p. 731), resulting in dangerously high levels of pollution in air, soil, water, and sediments; with key pollutants including lead, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, dioxins (Sepulveda et al., 2010, pp. 32-6). Thus, while the overly restricted consideration of green IT as being concerned with GHG emissions would have little to say about disposal and recycling directly, a broader view of green theory would show concern about the pollution, and its impacts on the workers, their descendents and the natural environment of areas like Guiyu in China (Sepulveda et al., 2010, pp. 31-7). Nonetheless, it is important to keep a sense of proportion 70 per cent of the life cycle emissions of heavy metals to water occur during materials extraction (James and Hopkinson, 2009, p. 8), rather than disposal and recycling: thus one of the key ways disposal and recycling can relate to pollution, is by recycling reducing the demand for further materials extraction, which does have signicant GHG benets. It is possible to design and manufacture hardware that out-performs previous standards for energy efciency and is easier to disassemble and recycle (Kurp, 2008, p. 13). It is, however, one thing to design and even manufacture a niche product that demonstrates what can be done, and another entirely for a manufacturer to make improved standards the norm for their production. This, perhaps, is the greatest reason for the RoHS regulations mentioned above being considered as important. If there are less of the hazardous substances in all the products being recycled, the reduction in the wellbeing of recycling workers, their descendents and other species in the region is not dependent on whether one particular model is purchased, rather than another. However, it is also important that the limits on hazardous substance use are adjusted downwards as techniques to substitute for them improve. Use It has already been established that there is substantial energy consumption associated with IT use. Earlier in the paper, I acknowledged that energy use does not equate precisely with GHG emissions. One key reason for the divergence between the two is renewable electricity generation. In use, there are minimal GHG emissions that can be attributed to renewable electricity generation, incomparably less than those for fossil fuel burning (or nuclear generation see Storm van Leeuwen and Smith, 2005, p. 5), but consideration of green concerns beyond GHG emissions shows why use even of photovoltaic (PV) generated solar electricity may be deprecated according to green thinking. PV panels comprise numerous hazardous chemicals, and thus pose a danger if waste is not disposed of properly (Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, 2009, pp. 9-23). Every form of electricity generation, even the best, has its downside, on green thinking that looks beyond GHG emissions. The implication of this is that even if we can get to a situation where our energy needs are met by renewable energy, the green view will be that there are good reasons to try for improved energy efciency.

In the short and medium term, the energy consumed in IT use is substantial, growing, and already problematic when considering GHG emissions. The power consumption of a computer in use, just as a standalone machine, can depend considerably on the applications being run [. . .] which can make a difference of a factor of two or three when the computer is in actual use (James and Hopkinson, 2009, p. 9). This makes it more difcult to assess the environmental impacts of IT use, but does not mean we should give up attempting to assess and reduce the environmental impact of individual machines. In practice, this means relying on other people to do the assessment, and to a large extent on eco-labels. The leading relevant eco-label is electronic product environmental assessment tool (EPEAT)[13]. EPEAT makes credible claims that it has brought about a variety of environmental benets (Green Electronics Council, 2010, p. 14) through persuading people to opt for EPEAT-labelled products, rather than unregistered alternatives. These have been benets both in terms of reduced energy consumption in use and in terms of benets in the production, and disposal and recycling phases discussed above. There have, meanwhile, been trends that would (ceteris paribus[14]) in any case have reduced per-unit power consumption, as technologies developed for laptops, such as LCD screens, power management, have been more widely adopted. As individuals we do not have to wait for new hardware with a better rating. We have opportunities to reduce power consumption by making use of power management, including by setting computers to enter standby relatively quickly, and ensuring they are powered down when not in use (ONeill, 2010, p. 74). However, we have reached a situation where it no longer makes sense to assess the environmental impacts as if we are operating standalone machines. Not just computers, but increasingly also music players, and hand-held devices, inter alia, are seen as impotent or impractical if they do not have network access capabilities. Moreover, there is a suggestion that servers and networking together account for rather more energy consumption in use than client computers do (Chilamkurti et al., 2009, p. 2). About half of the energy impact comes from telecoms infrastructure. Broadband has facilitated increasingly inefcient data formats, as what are at heart simple text emails are sent with corporate branding graphics. Watching television programmes using on demand services, downloading lms, or playing real-time networked games can be particularly demanding on bandwidth (Song et al., 2010, p. 112): our usage patterns may lie behind increasing provision of telecoms infrastructure, and environmental impacts arising from that provision. While less than networking; servers and their support infrastructure (such as cooling) were still assessed as 23 per cent of the energy consumption of IT in use (Chilamkurti et al., 2009, p. 2). The energy consumption of activities such as conducting searches has received attention for some years (Kersten, 2007), but this is only part of the story. While energy efciency may be improved by moving from several small data centres to a single, more efciently designed and used one, decisions are being made to locate data centers in places where cheap coal-red electricity is available (van Horn, 2010), even though coal ring is the method of electricity generation which is most GHG intensive. Moreover, while cloud computing holds the promise of reducing, for example, the storage requirements for desk-top computers, for any benets to be realised, it needs to be used instead of, not in addition to, local storage. Even if it does, there is a danger that any environmental benets will be lost to the increased GHG emissions from data centres using coal-red electricity.

Even greener IT

73

JICES 9,2

74

In mitigation ONeill (2010, p. 1) points out that if the ICT industry is responsible for approximately 2 percent of worldwide carbon emissions [. . .] what is indisputable is that IT is in a unique position to inuence the other 98 per cent. This leaves a heavy responsibility: how can we best exercise our inuence so that ITs are used to promote environmental responsibility (generally, and not just in terms of GHG emissions), rather than allowing them to have environmentally bad impacts without any mitigation? Since transport accounts for about one-fourth of CO2 emissions (Chapman, 2007, p. 354), and it is easy to see how IT can be used to replace travel (Roby, 2010, p. 27), it is quite clear IT can lead to a reduction in GHG emissions through travel replacement. One way is by substituting for ground travel, notably with the potential for reducing commuting travel, however, the story is not simple, with the possibility of rebound effects as some telecommuters move further from the ofce base, and thus travel further on the days they are physically present in the ofce (Fuhr and Pociask, 2011, p. 42), even if the effect is an overall reduction in road travel (Ory and Mokhtarian, 2006, p. 590)[15]. Indeed, there is a worry that a further rebound effect may cancel out any benets: that of increased heating (or in warmer climates, air conditioning) (Baker et al., 2010, pp. 141-2), since it tends to use more energy to maintain lots of home ofces at a comfortable working temperature than one large ofce block. Total emissions from aircraft are more damaging to the climate than the damage that would be caused by the same amount of ground-level emissions of CO2 (Chapman, 2007, p. 361), thus a reduction in demand for air travel could be a particularly useful outcome of increasing IT use. But telecommunications and travel have risen together through many historical technological advancements and political events, and there is no compelling reason at this time to believe that current and future events will dramatically alter that relationship (Mokhtarian, 2002, p. 54). IT enables the worker to set up working arrangements that depend on regular use of ying to get between the employers site and a weekend home (Wickham and Vecchi, 2008, p. 697), and IT facilitates the observed increase in the number of companies with widely dispersed project teams (Aguilera, 2008) where additional long-distance ights are made to make (even rare) face-to-face meetings. So IT may have a potential to replace travel, with positive environmental effects, but that potential is largely unrealised. It should not be forgotten that IT can be used for environmental benet. Clever uses of IT can reduce waste, and thereby reduce pollution in a very wide variety of ways. The details of even a small number of ways to do this would expand this paper beyond a manageable size[16]. However, we need to be wary of hype, with marketing departments of technology and service providers [. . .] touting whatever products they have as green (Mingay, 2007, p. 2). Further, we need again to be wary of rebound effects. If the effect of waste reduction in production is to reduce price, then the simplest economic analysis suggests that across the wide range of normal demand elasticities, more will be consumed. Thus, the challenge of using IT to reduce waste is to do so in a way that does not increase consumption (or at least consumption of sorts that fail to produce signicant net gains in wellbeing[17]). Concern for greenness that does not extend beyond concern about GHGs may not highlight sufciently that the rebound effects could result in extra resource consumption and pollution.

Usually, this is where consideration of green IT ends (and all too often without the concern about rebound effects, either). What else? A fuller consideration reveals further substantial tendencies of IT that tend to work against it justifying the label green. I discuss three main ways: the way IT facilitates and enables the promotion of activities that work against greenness, the upgrade treadmill and the relationship with ows of wealth. Facilitating and promoting ungreen activities The concept of the killer app was coined precisely because historically there have been applications of computing that have persuaded people to obtain a computer precisely to run that application: this could range from spreadsheets and the rst mass-market personal computers (Alonso et al., 1995, p. 28), through web browsers that brought pornography onto computer screens, and more recently to multimedia computers which are bought to record and play back television programmes and lms that could be received in any one of a variety of ways, or teenagers wanting computers to access social networking web sites. Demand generation has, thus, been a key part of the spread of computing. There is a good argument that demand-generation persuading people that their lives would be improved if only they had is diametrically opposed to greenness (see MacKerron, 2011, note 22 and associated text). Implicit in it usually is some generated dissatisfaction. This dissatisfaction may be competitive, as when personal computers were bought because rivals were able to use spreadsheets to run the numbers; or psychological, for example when a teenager fears being left out, if they cannot access social networking at midnight. The green attitude would be one where businesses eschew any activity intended to generate dissatisfaction or demand, but seek to provide for needs more thoroughly, more efciently (waste being implicitly anti-green), and in a more comprehensively inclusive way. More generally, much of the internet is intimately tied up with advertising (Lenard and Rubin, 2010), which currently essentially is the demand-generation industry. Huge parts of the internet work because they are paid for by advertising, either directly, or through data harvesting that enables advertisers to more effectively target adverts (Lenard and Rubin, 2010). It might philosophically be possible to argue that if you avoid being persuaded by the adverts, your using the service paid for by advertising does not implicate you in the demand generation. However, there are more subtle advertising effects, such as promoting brand recognition (Radder and Huang, 2008, p. 239) and initiating word-of-mouth that may still mean the individual who tries to avoid being persuaded by the adverts that pay for internet services, actually is persuaded by them. Using services paid for by advertising implicates the individual in demand generation. IT is, as well as a vehicle for demand generation, an aspect of consumerism and capitalism in itself, so that by the end of the twentieth century Geekish technophilia became an essential part of consumerism (Buhs, 2010, p. 74). Many buy technology, not just for functional purposes, but because they buy into the image associated (probably by demand generating advertising) with the technology (Labrecque et al., 2011, p. 7). By doing so, they contribute towards the pay of those who sold, shipped, assembled, manufactured and designed the technology, and the prots of the companies involved.

Even greener IT

75

JICES 9,2

76

All of that money, in turn will have been used to generate yet further economic activity. Denitions of greenness that extend beyond GHG emissions are likely to imply questioning of whether that economic activity truly results in wellbeing for all. Globalisation is another consequence strongly associated with ITs. As already mentioned, as individuals we know we are working in increasingly location-independent collaborations. Our individual experiences are only the tip of this iceberg. ITs are also an essential enabling technology in supply chains being put together, and functioning, on a global scale for a much higher proportion of consumption than ever before, exploiting inequalities of pay rates (Birchall and Giambona, 2008, p. 247) and pollution standards, and extracting resources in an unsustainable way. The upgrade treadmill The concept of the upgrade treadmill (Szyperski, 2002, p. xxii), whereby software needs regular upgrading requiring the purchase of more powerful hardware (Szyperski, 2002, p. 6) has been in circulation for well over a decade[18]. It is clear now, however, that there is an element of feedback (or a vicious circle) in the process (ONeill, 2010, p. 76). When the decision is taken that it is time for new end-user hardware (whether it be a computer, or a hand-held device), it normally arrives with newer versions of at least some of the software. It is not, however, the individual who is key here: hardware manufacturers and software rms are perfectly happy to exploit this tendency, with software rms designing software that will make use of ever greater hardware specications (see Larus, 2009, p. 67 and Myhrvolds four laws of software, quoted by Larus), and hardware rms happy to supply new computers with new, more demanding, software pre-loaded. In doing so, they are conscious that the more individual users have the new version of the software installed, the more pressure there is on the remainder to upgrade to access content produced with the assumption that they have the newer version of the software. Similarly with security: software rms release software that has security aws that can be exploited. Users, to keep their systems reasonably secure when exploits are produced, are required to patch, but eventually the supplier stops patching legacy software, giving the user a stark choice: upgrade, stop using the software, or accept vulnerabilities (Gilchrist et al., 2008, p. 4327). The more users who have already upgraded, the less likely it is that the supplier will continue to patch legacy software, and the sooner those who are reluctant to upgrade will be faced with that choice. This upgrade treadmill is a particular, particularly powerful manifestation of a wider phenomenon. Since the middle of the twentieth century, producers have systematically tried to design and manufacture products with limited useful lives (Young and Young, 2004, pp. 45, 79), since that is the route to repeat purchases. A green view would be that design and production techniques should be aimed at maximising useful lives of products (including computer hardware), and to facilitate repairs. Where concern is principally with GHG emissions, this might be restricted to occasions when embodied carbon exceeds the impacts of improvements in energy efciency. On broader denitions of greenness, maximising useful lives, and facilitating repairs will be preferred in more circumstances. Attempts to repair, refurbish, and renovate IT hardware, however, face a problem beyond designs that do not facilitate repair and renovation. The price of new hardware has actually started to fall. After many years when hardware got faster at the same price, not cheaper (Myhrvold, as quoted p. 67 in Larus (2009)), we have nally entered

a phase where retail prices for current models are falling. This has the effect of making the labour cost element of repair and renovation more signicant, meaning that the proportion of hardware that is repaired and renovated is highly likely to fall. Nonetheless, except where there is very clear evidence that environmental benets (most likely from reduced energy consumption) sufcient to more than outweigh the full environmental impacts of production of the replacement, the preferred green option will be to try to extend the life of the hardware. Re-distribution of wealth and power, and its impacts ITs are designed, produced and sold very largely by businesses owned by people from the richest parts of the world. They are bought by users more widely spread across the globe. As such ITs, and the intellectual property rights associated with them, have a tendency to re-distribute wealth towards those who already are relatively wealthy (Drahos, 2002, p. 16). There is a direct tension here with green advocacy of wellbeing for all. There are also secondary effects: the already wealthy (in global terms) have lifestyles that have greater impacts in terms of unsustainable consumption. This wealth also enables them to fund political candidates and inuence power structures in a way that continues to encourage and facilitate globalisation and unsustainable consumption. It is reasonable to question how much of these effects can be attributed to the purchases of IT: after all, the owners of the businesses bear primary moral responsibility for the consequences of their actions and their purchases. Nonetheless, the effects are present. Failure to extend the consideration of green IT to these wider issues (of demand generation, the upgrade treadmill and the relationship with ows of wealth) can bring the idea into a degree of disrepute, tainting the vision. Conclusion: our responsibility The relationship between IT and greenness is complex and multi-faceted. It cannot be fully understood by looking simply at GHG emissions, even though GHG emissions are a serious and substantial issue (and quite probably the most signicant issue) in that relationship. Looking at a broader view of greenness, we get an agenda for our responsibilities with respect to IT. Personally we can try to step off the upgrade treadmill. More importantly, where we work in academia in disciplines that involve training future IT professionals, we can try to dismantle it: promoting open standards, open source software, hardware-efcient and properly tested software, and resisting using the latest le formats unless fully backwards-compatible. When we are forced to comply with the upgrade treadmill, we can try to minimise the direct environmental impacts of purchases we make, or sometimes we can inuence purchases made on our behalf by employers. But to do this, we need information on the lifecycle (or as much of it as we can ever practically get information about). Beyond the upgrade treadmill we can work to reduce environmental effects in use (avoiding unnecessary use of bandwidth, unnecessary searches, and so far as is possible advertising funded services). We can try to use for IT for environmental benet and avoid ungreen activities, while working to rectify the distribution of wealth and power. In the end, though, for many of us, while it is not enough on its own, it is what we can do with our professional expertise that is our main responsibility.

Even greener IT

77

JICES 9,2

Notes 1. In this paper, I use the abbreviation IT throughout, because green IT appears to be the accepted term: in other circumstances I would use ICT, meaning information and communications technology in the same way. 2. Incorporating animal rights, anti-war sentiments, protection of wilderness, concern about ozone depletion, fair trade, protection of biodiversity, opposition to nuclear power and weapons, tree-hugging, opposition to pollution and many more strands. 3. I am treating the substance of a green denition of wellbeing as outside the scope of this paper. In strands of green thinking it will include such elements as ourishing, spiritual health, contentment, and sometimes happiness and freedom from unmet genuine needs. All will include non-humans and future generations in signicant strands of greenness, and certainly includes the entire breadth of the human population alive now, which in turn implies a concern for members of disadvantaged groups. 4. In saying this I am aware of views within economic thinking (and practices derived from them) that include dummy values for things not traded, but which are recognised as valuable. These views and practices, however, have less impact than the continual operation of markets. 5. Again, measured in millennia. 6. To an extent that is incompatible with sustainability, as greens dene it. 7. Which imply inequalities in wellbeing. 8. Or the enforcement of them. 9. Including server farms and datacentres, ofce equipment, desktops, and mobile devices. 10. Thus, ONeill (2010, p. 1) says that It is widely cited in IT circles that the ICT industry is responsible for approximately 2 per cent of worldwide carbon emissions. The difference between this and the 3 per cent of Somavat et al. (2010) could be accounted for by the difference between energy use and carbon emissions, although there is also the difference between the broad denition of computing devices used by Somavat et al. and what might be considered to be the ICT industry as such. Also relevant may be the timing of the analysis: it often takes time for ndings to spread sufciently to become widely cited, and in the meantime, the numbers can reasonably be expected to have increased. 11. There is nothing within the regulations to stop manufacturers replacing regulated hazardous substances with unregulated materials that are more carbon-intensive. Facilitating recycling may, however, result in reductions of GHG emissions. 12. Although that may still be a very limited extent, since they are per-unit limits, and so are perfectly compatible with increasing use of the hazardous substances. 13. www.epeat.net (accessed 21 April 2011). 14. This clearly does not, in fact hold. 15. Although shifts between employers, and more fundamental shifts in employment patterns (neither were considered by Ory and Mokhtarian (2006)) could cause a net increase even when within individual employer-employee relationships the effect is a reduction in travel. Further, a reduction in road use by some can lead to others taking advantage of the reduced congestion to set up work arrangements that involve new commuting using the road capacity freed up by the telecommuters (Litman, 2010, p. 4). 16. Some examples being generated by the research of my colleagues at the Institute of Energy and Sustainable Development at De Montfort University can be seen at: www.iesd.dmu.ac. uk/research/projects_intelli.html, for example (accessed 25 April 2011).

78

17. Particularly remembering the green concern for wellbeing for all. 18. While I have referred to the second edition, the 1997/1998 rst edition also clearly contained the same concept, see Lee et al. (2009, pp. 304, 313). References Aguilera, A. (2008), Business travel and mobile workers, Transportation Research A, Vol. 42 No. 8, pp. 1109-16. Alonso, R., Chang, Y.-L., Iftode, L. and Mani, V.S. (1995), Managing video data in a mobile environment, ACM SIGMOD Record, Vol. 24 No. 4, pp. 28-33. Baker, K., Lomas, K.J. and Rylatt, M. (2010), Energy use, in Jenks, M. and Jones, C. (Eds), Dimensions of the Sustainable City, Springer, Dordrecht, pp. 129-43. Barry, J. (2008), Towards a green republicanism: constitutionalism, political economy, and the green state, The Good Society, Vol. 17 No. 2, pp. 3-11. Birchall, D.W. and Giambona, G. (2008), The impact of ICT on the work patterns of managers and their organisations, EuroMed Journal of Business, Vol. 3 No. 3, pp. 244-62. Buhs, J. (2010), Wildmen on the cyberfrontier: the computer geek as an iteration in the American wildman lore cycle, Folklore, Vol. 121 No. 1, pp. 61-80. Chapman, L. (2007), Transport and climate change: a review, Journal of Transport Geography, Vol. 15 No. 5, pp. 354-67. Chi, X., Streicher-Porte, M., Wang, M.Y.L. and Reuter, M.A. (2011), Informal electronic waste recycling: a sector review with special focus on China, Waste Management, Vol. 31 No. 4, pp. 731-42. Chilamkurti, N., Zeadally, S. and Mentiplay, F. (2009), Green networking for major components of information communication technology systems, EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, p. 7. Clarke, H. (2010), Trade policy and the global environment, SAPIENS, Vol. 3 No. 2, available at: http://sapiens.revues.org/index1069.html (accessed 18 April 2011). Drahos, P. (2002), Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?, Earthscan, London. Environment Agency (UK) (2011), Importers, rebranders and manufacturers, available at: www. environment-agency.gov.uk/business/topics/waste/32106.aspx (accessed 19 April 2011). Fairweather, N.B. (1996), The relationship between liberal freedom and green moral and political theory, PhD thesis, University of Wales, Cardiff. Fairweather, N.B. (1998), No, PAPA: why incomplete codes of ethics are worse than none at all, in Collste, G. (Ed.), Ethics and Information Technology, New Academic Publishers, Delhi (The paper has since been anthologised, for example in Spinello, R., Tavani, H. (eds) (2001) Readings in CyberEthics, Jones and Bartlett, Boston, MA). Fletcher, R. (2009), Against wilderness, Green Theory & Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp. 169-79. Fuhr, J.P. and Pociask, S. (2011), Broadband and telecommuting: helping the US environment and the economy, Low Carbon Economy, Vol. 2, pp. 41-7. Ghose, A., Hoesch-Klohe, K., Hinsche, L. and Le, L.-S. (2010), Green business process management: a research agenda, Australasian Journal of Information Systems, Vol. 16 No. 2, pp. 103-17. Gibson, R. and Hassan, S. (2005), Sustainability Assessment: Criteria, Processes and Applications, Earthscan, London.

Even greener IT

79

JICES 9,2

80

Gilchrist, J., Frize, M., Bariciak, E. and Townsend, D. (2008), Integration of new technology in a legacy system for collecting medical data challenges and lessons learned, 30th Annual International IEEE EMBS Conference, Vancouver, BC, pp. 4326-9. Green Electronics Council (2010), Environmental Benets of 2009 EPEAT Purchasing, Green Electronics Council, Portland, OR. Greenwood, D. (2007), The halfway house: democracy, complexity, and the limits to markets in green political economy, Environmental Politics, Vol. 16 No. 1, pp. 73-91. Huang, G. (2008), Mining and tourism: comparing spacial patterns, socioeconomic contributions, and environmental impacts in China, PhD thesis, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT. James, P. and Hopkinson, L. (2009), Energy and environmental impacts of personal computing: a best practice review prepared for the joint information services committee (JISC), Sustainable Information Technology in Tertiary Education, available at: www.susteit.org.uk/ uploads/DOCS/39-personal_computers_nal_27_5_09_v2.doc (accessed 17 April 2011). Kamminga, M.R. (2008), The ethics of climate politics: four modes of moral discourse, Environmental Politics, Vol. 17 No. 4, pp. 673-92. Kawa, A. and Golinska, P. (2010), Supply chain arrangements in recovery network, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 6071, pp. 292-301. Kennet, M. and Heinemann, V. (2006), Green economics: setting the scene. Aims, context, and philosophical underpinning of the distinctive new solutions offered by green economics, International Journal of Green Economics, Vol. 1 Nos 1/2, pp. 68-102. Kersten, R. (2007), Your CO2 footprint when using the internet, Rolf Kerstens Weblog, 4 May, available at: http://blogs.sun.com/rolfk/entry/your_co2_footprint_when_using (accessed 25 April 2011). Kurp, P. (2008), Green computing, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 51 No. 10, pp. 11-13. Labrecque, L.I., Krishen, A.S. and Grzeskowiak, S. (2011), Exploring social motivations for brand loyalty: conformity versus escapism, Journal of Brand Management, Vol. 17 No. 7, pp. 465-71. Larus, J. (2009), Spending Moores dividend, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 52 No. 5, pp. 62-9. Lee, J., Hong, S.-J., Sawng, S. and Kim, J.S. (2009), Perceived subjective features of software components: consumer behavior in a software component market, ETRI Journal, Vol. 31 No. 3, pp. 304-14. Lenard, T.M. and Rubin, P.H. (2010), In defense of data: information and the costs of privacy, Policy & Internet, Vol. 2 No. 1, p. 7. Litman, T. (2010), Are vehicle travel reduction targets justied?, Vol. 24, available at: www.vtpi. org/vmt_red.pdf (accessed 24 April 2011). MacKerron, G. (2011), Happiness economics from 35,000 feet, Journal of Economic Surveys, forthcoming. Mandel, S. (2010), Towards a green economics approach to cost-benet analysis, International Journal of Green Economics, Vol. 4 No. 4, pp. 380-92. Markvart, T. (2009), Radical green political theory and land use decision making for sustainability in the region of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, Environnement Urbain/Urban Environment, Vol. 3, pp. 64-82. Mazurek, J. (2003), Making Microchips: Policy, Globalization, and Economic Restructuring in the Semiconductor Industry, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Mingay, S. (2007), Green IT: The New Industry Shock Wave, Gartner, Stamford, CT.

Mokhtarian, P.L. (2002), Telecommunications and travel: the case for complementarity, Journal of Industrial Ecology, Vol. 6 No. 2, pp. 43-57. MRS Bulletin (2011), US congress renews America COMPETES act America COMPETES act, MRS Bulletin, February, p. 88. Murugesan, S. (2008), Harnessing green IT: principles and practices, IT Professional, Vol. 10 No. 1, pp. 24-33. National Measurement Ofce (UK) (2010), RoHS, available at: www.bis.gov.uk/nmo/ enforcement/rohs-home (accessed 20 April 2011). ONeill, M. (2010), Green IT for Sustainable Business Practice: An ISEB Foundation Guide, British Informatics Society, Swindon. Ory, D.T. and Mokhtarian, P.L. (2006), Which came rst, the telecommuting or the residential relocation?, An empirical analysis of causality, Urban Geography, Vol. 27 No. 7, pp. 590-609. Pepper, D. (2005), Utopianism and environmentalism, Environmental Politics, Vol. 14 No. 1, pp. 3-22. Radder, L. and Huang, W. (2008), High-involvement and low-involvement products: a comparison of brand awareness among students at a South African university, Journal of Fashion Marketing & Management, Vol. 12 No. 2, pp. 232-43. Roby, H. (2010), Towards Smart Business Travel, The Open University, Milton Keynes (for Transport for London). Sachs, J.D. (2009), A clunker of a climate policy, Scientic American, Vol. 301 No. 5, p. 34. Sepulveda, A., Schluep, M., Renaud, F.G., Streicher, M., Kuehr, R., Hageluken, C. and Gerecke, A.C. (2010), A review of the environmental fate and effects of hazardous substances released from electrical and electronic equipments during recycling: examples from China and India, Environmental Impact Assessment Review, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 28-41. Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (2008), Electronics manufacturing a deadly process requiring thousands of toxic chemicals (as quoted in James and Hopkinson (2009), but apparently no longer available). Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (2009), Toward a just and sustainable solar energy industry, available at: http://svtc.org/wp-content/uploads/Silicon_Valley_Toxics_Coalition_-_ Toward_a_Just_and_Sust.pdf (accessed 18 April 2011). Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (2010), E-waste, available at: http://svtc.org/our-work/e-waste/ (accessed 18 April 2011). Somavat, P., Jadhav, S. and Namboodiri, V. (2010), Accounting for the energy consumption of personal computing including portable devices, Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Energy-Efcient Computing and Networking (e-Energy 10), ACM, Passau, Germany, pp. 141-9. Song, H., Kim, B.-W. and Mukherjee, B. (2010), Long-reach optical access networks: a survey of research challenges, demonstrations, and research challenges, demonstrations, and bandwidth assignment mechanisms, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, Vol. 12 No. 1, pp. 112-23. Storm van Leeuwen, J.W. and Smith, P. (2011), Nuclear power, the energy balance, chapter 1, the CO2-emission of the nuclear life-cycle, Vol. 20, available at: www.stormsmith.nl/ report20050803/Chap_1.pdf (accessed 20 April 2011). Szyperski, C. (2002), Component Software: Beyond Object-Oriented Programming, 2nd ed., Addison-Wesley, London.

Even greener IT

81

JICES 9,2

82

van Holsteijn en Kemna, B.V. (2005), Methodology study eco-design of energy-using products methodology report, available at: www.vhknet.com/download/MEEUP_Methodology_ n.pdf (accessed 19 April 2011). van Horn, J. (2010), Hey! coal! get off of my cloud!, Cool IT weblog, 27 May, available at: www. greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/Cool-IT/hey-coal-get-off-of-my-cloud/blog/ 11961 (accessed 25 April 2011). Wickham, J. and Vecchi, A. (2008), Local rms and global reach: business air travel and the irish software cluster, European Planning Studies, Vol. 16 No. 5, pp. 693-710. Williams, E.C. (2004), Energy intensity of computer manufacturing: hybrid assessment combining process and economic input 2 output methods, Environmental Science & Technology, Vol. 38 No. 22, pp. 6166-74. Young, W.H. and Young, N.K. (2004), The 1950s, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT. Corresponding author N. Ben Fairweather can be contacted at: nbf@dmu.ac.uk

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: reprints@emeraldinsight.com Or visit our web site for further details: www.emeraldinsight.com/reprints