Recommendations for the EC on how to reduce the environmental impact of the ICT sector

This page contains a number of comments and recommendations for the European Commission on how to reduce the environmental impact of the ICT sector. This initiative originated during the "Sustainability session" at the Free Silicon Conference 2023 (https://wiki.f-si.org/index.php/FSiC2023 ) and the views are shared by all the signatories listed at the end of the document. There is a general consensus in the academic literature that the environmental impact of Information and communications technology (ICT) needs to drastically decrease in the coming years, as for all economic sectors, and that its current trajectory is not sustainable [Freitag21,Pirson23]. The direct environmental impacts of ICT devices notably originate from the various phases of the device life cycle:

1. design and fabrication (e.g. emission of polluting gases as fluorinated compounds for silicon etching, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions due to electricity consumption)
2. usage (e.g. energy consumption)
3. disposal

The environmental impacts of device design & fabrication, called embodied impacts (e.g. embodied GHG or carbon emissions for the climate change impact), have often been neglected in academic publications, but play for some type of devices, like the ubiquitous smartphones, the dominant role [Gupta21]. The end-of-life of systems is today dealt with direct landfill in more than 82% of electrical and electronic devices [Forti20]. The GHG emissions of device disposal will most probably rise when system end-of-life will include more recycling to minimize e-waste.

The global race for "better" devices (more capable, more energy efficient, faster, smaller, etc.) has been associated over the entire ICT history with a significant rebound effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation) ) which has caused an overall increase, rather than decrease, of the environmental impact of the ICT sector. Positive indirect effects of the progress of the ICT sector (e.g. less polluting travels thanks to more video conferences) are 1) difficult to quantify exactly because of the mathematical uncertainty on the available data, and 2) counterbalanced by negative indirect effects (e.g. more consumption of goods because of e-shopping). Therefore, the positive indirect effects cannot justify uncontrolled growth in direct GHG emissions of the ICT sector.

Yet we (the signatories below) all agree on the following recommendations:

• Technology should become dramatically more sober in a short term. Programmed obsolescence (e.g. of smartphones), creation of futile needs (e.g. ubiquitous video consumption), unnecessary race for sensors-everywhere and ubiquitous data collection (IoT) should be contrasted. We think that the current economical model is disfunctional and should be rediscussed. We welcome the recent regulation (EU) 2023/1670 which guarantees the right-to-repair for smartphones and tablets for at least 7 years after the end of the distribution on the market and we advise that it will be extended to a broader class of devices after carrying out a duly preparatory study in line with the statement of repair.eu at https://repair.eu/news/we-need-the-right-to-repair-to-be-universal/. Drastic reductions of GHG emissions will need to be conducted for all families of electronic products for the Paris climate agreement to be respected, as the current global trajectory is far from the Paris agreement objectives [UN22]. In this context, it is clear that the open-silicon movement can play a role thanks to openness of the documentation and to the accessibility of open-source tools for repurposing or updating devices.
• The modularity of electronic products and their compatibility between vendors should increase for minimizing the disposal of yet-perfectly-functional devices or components. We think, for example, at computer components, embedded systems and power components like batteries and inverters. New businesses for refurbishing and reusing components shall emerge and be supported by European Union. More generally, components shall be used until reaching a physical reliability limit, employing the six methods defined in the EU EECONE project for acting on electronics carbon impact: refurbish, reuse, repair, increase reliability, reduce, recycle (6Rs https://www.eecone.com/eecone/home/ ). For this purpose also, open-silicon is key to achieve large scale 6Rs.
• Innovations targeting lower GHG emissions, lower waste and increased fairness will succeed only if external, independent auditors make the Life Cycle Assessments (LCA)s (like Fraunhofer for Fairphone 4 [Sanchez22] and Thinkstep AG for Dell R740 [Busa19]) and conclude on sufficient improvement of KPIs from one product to the next.
• Europe alone can set high standards and become an example to be blueprinted globally. Yet, the market size of EU is limited and EU should encourage the creation of world-wide regulations to limit the environmental impact in the ICT sector. For example, a) imposing product-level GHG emissions and waste disclosure with advanced information on the whole value chain (including Scope 3 and location-based Scope 2), as a complement to company-level carbon disclosure defined by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol [GHG04] and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards , and b) banning from the EU market products with too low environmental or fairness standards.

These actions can define a novel EU-initiated family of ICT systems and the corresponding design methods that will pave the way for deploying sustainable technologies on a global scale.

Signatories

September 30, 2023

• Luca Alloatti, Free Silicon Foundation
• David Bol, ICTEAM Institute, UCLouvain
• Maxime Pelcat, Univ. Rennes, INSA Rennes, IETR, CNRS UMR6164
• Lilia Zaourar, CEA DRT LIST, IC and Digital System Division

References

• [Busa22] Andreas Busa, Malcolm Hegeman, Jeff Vickers, Natalia Duque-Ciceri, and Constantin Herrmann. 2019. Life Cycle Assessment of Dell R740. https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-us/products/servers/technical-support/Full_LCA_Dell_R740.pdf
• [Forti20] Forti V., Baldé C.P., Kuehr R., Bel G. The Global E-waste Monitor 2020: Quantities, flows and the circular economy potential. United Nations University (UNU)/United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) – co-hosted SCYCLE Programme, International Telecommunication Union (ITU) & International Solid Waste Association (ISWA), Bonn/Geneva/Rotterdam.
• [Freitag21] Freitag, C., Berners-Lee, M., Widdicks, K., Knowles, B., Blair, G. S., & Friday, A. (2021). The real climate and transformative impact of ICT: A critique of estimates, trends, and regulations. Patterns, 2(9).
• [GHG04] GHG Protocol Standard. The greenhouse gas protocol: A corporate accounting and reporting standard, revised version, 2004.
• [Gupta21] Gupta, U., Kim, Y. G., Lee, S., Tse, J., Lee, H. H. S., Wei, G. Y., ... & Wu, C. J. (2021, February). Chasing carbon: The elusive environmental footprint of computing. In 2021 IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA) (pp. 854-867). IEEE.
• [Pirson23] Pirson, T., Delhaye, T. P., Pip, A., Le Brun, G., Raskin, J. P., & Bol, D. (2023). The environmental footprint of ic production: Review, analysis and lessons from historical trends. IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing.
• [Sanchez22] Sánchez, D., Proske, M., & Baur, S. J. (2022). Life Cycle Assessment of the Fairphone 4.
• [UN22] United Nations Environment Programme. (2022). Emissions Gap Report 2022: The Closing Window. Climate Crisis Calls for Rapid Transformation of Societies. UN.