Technology
By Samuel Greengard Communications of the ACM, Vol. 64 No. 12, Pages 23-25 10.1145/3490165 Modern life increasingly is defined by the activities we . Modern life increasingly is defined by the activities we engage in online: Zoom meetings at work, Netflix and Xbox marathons at home, and a steady stream of YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook video clips in the nooks and crannies in between. There are many benefits to life online, yet there are also undeniable social, economic, and environmental costs. While global emissions from video streaming and other digital activities comprise somewhere in the neighborhood of 3% of the total,a the voracious and growing appetite for bandwidth is raising concerns about sustainability—and prompting some to wonder whether it is possible to keep up with the demand. "We're seeing the digitization of everything—work, entertainment and shopping. There's a huge shift in lifestyle and it's sharpening the focus on how all of these devices impact things," says Eric Williams, a professor of sustainability at the Golisano Institute for Sustainability of the Rochester Institute of Technology. As bandwidth demand ticks upward and carries the demand for power with it, "There's an emerging discussion about the role of all the digital services we've come to rely on," says Mike Hazas, a professor in the Department of Information Technology at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. "It's an important discussion, because how we design and use systems will define our future." Back to Top Left to Our Devices There's a common assumption that life online is cleaner and greener than life in the physical realm. There is near-zero cost to sending an email message or viewing a YouTube video. While it is true a Zoom meeting consumes only a fraction of the energy of a commute to work or a flight across the country, it does require bandwidth and electricity. Of course, as millions of people venture online for billions of video calls, the energy and bandwidth requirements accumulate, and can spike. The ability to click and instantly watch videos—and even autoplay them in various apps—has changed behavior in profound ways. According to networking firm Sandvine, upwards of 60% of the traffic on the Internet is now related to consumer video streaming, and sites such as Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube carry the bulk of this traffic, which is growing at an annual clip of about 24%.b The Carbon Trust, an independent U.K.-based advisory organization comprised of experts in sustainability, reports that long-form video streaming accounts for 45% of all Internet traffic.c Artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, cryptocurrency mining, Blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are poised to ratchet up the stakes further. "These systems will add huge volumes of traffic to the Internet, and much of this traffic is automated and not constrained by users," says Kelly Widdicks, a post-doctoral researcher at the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University in the U.K. The direct use of devices, and how they draw power and bandwidth, is not the only factor in understanding how they impact things, however. About 90% of the energy a smartphone uses during its life cycle is embedded in the manufacturing process.d This includes collecting rare materials for batteries, fabricating devices, and recycling and disposing of components. What's more, after a smartphone handset is produced, about 90% of the energy consumption takes place off the phone, including on the network and in the datacenter.e Further complicating matters: fast, persistent Internet connections modify behavior. A 2021 study conducted by a pair of researchers at the U.K.'s University of Sussex, Bernado Calderola and Steve Sorrell, found that the availability of telework may actually encourage people to move farther from their place of work and engage in additional non-work-related travel. The authors noted that such "results provi...