A high-level estimate of the material footprints of the ICT and the E&M sector

19 pages•Published: May 10, 2018

Jens Malmodin, Pernilla Bergmark and Sepideh Matinfar

Abstract

This paper attempts to make a high-level estimate of the material footprints of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Entertainment and Media (E&M) sectors for one year from four different perspectives while including the full life cycle of products and applying a top-down perspective. The four perspectives explored are: i) amount of materials used; ii) carbon footprint of the materials focusing on Raw Materials Acquisition (RMA) and End of Life Treatment (EoLT) stages; iii) material resource depletion; and iv) toxicity of materials.
For the given assumptions, it is estimated that the sectors represent about 0,5% of the global annual usage of the selected materials, and for several materials (indium, gallium and germanium), ICT and E&M usage represents as much as 80-90% of the overall usage. Their use of materials represents about 0.9% of the carbon footprint for the selected materials, and about 0.1% of the total global carbon footprint, while the sectors material resource depletion potential is estimated to be between 13% and 48% of overall global depletion for the selected materials, depending on impact assessment method. Finally, the for toxicity of the selected materials, plus cement production, ICT and E&M are estimated to represent about 3.3%, based on ReCiPe. Toxicity and resource depletion results and the mass result for specific materials all indicate that the ICT and E&M sectors play a larger role than their average share of the total annual materials usage indicates, and gold and copper are identified as the most impacting materials. The applied top-down method provide only coarse estimates and further research is needed based on bottom-up methods.

Keyphrases: abiotic depletion potential, e&m sector, ict, ict sector, material carbon footprint, material ecosystem toxicity potential, material footprint, material human toxicity potential, material resource depletion potential, media sector

In: Birgit Penzenstadler, Steve Easterbrook, Colin Venters and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed (editors). ICT4S2018. 5th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Sustainability, vol 52, pages 168-186.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/XvgV
	https://doi.org/10.29007/q5fw

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{ICT4S2018:high_level_estimate_material,
  author    = {Jens Malmodin and Pernilla Bergmark and Sepideh Matinfar},
  title     = {A high-level estimate of the material footprints of the ICT and the E&M sector},
  booktitle = {ICT4S2018. 5th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Sustainability},
  editor    = {Birgit Penzenstadler and Steve Easterbrook and Colin Venters and Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Computing},
  volume    = {52},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2398-7340},
  url       = {/publications/paper/XvgV},
  doi       = {10.29007/q5fw},
  pages     = {168-186},
  year      = {2018}}

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