{"id":4501,"date":"2009-04-29T12:11:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-29T12:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=4501"},"modified":"2024-01-06T16:05:52","modified_gmt":"2024-01-06T16:05:52","slug":"its-all-about-dematerialization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2009\/04\/29\/its-all-about-dematerialization\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s all about dematerialization"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If climate-change experts are correct in thinking that we could be close to a “tipping point” that might accelerate<\/a> the already substantial climate change we’ve seen to date, the pressure to find solutions is sure to intensify. One of the potential mitigating factors is something that economists and scientists like to call “dematerialization.” Simply put, this is the process by which products and services with greater environmental impact are gradually replaced by those with less impact. As Wikipedia defines it<\/a>, the term refers to the absolute or relative reduction in the quantity of materials required to serve economic functions in society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Theoretically, the IT industry should be a great contributor to this effect or process, for a variety of reasons. For example, computers have gotten a lot smaller, cheaper and more efficient, in terms of computing power per watt of energy, etc. As this piece<\/a> from Hewlett-Packard notes, the fastest computer in 1946 performed about 5,000 operations a second, weighed more than 30 tons, and consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electricity. In contrast, an off-the-shelf laptop purchased today has thousands of times the processing power, weighs just a few pounds, and consumes less than one-thousandth the electricity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This effect can have related “rebound” effects, however, as a number of researchers have noted. The fact that electronic devices including computers have become smaller and cheaper to both buy and operate means that there are also a lot more of them, as this paper points out<\/a>, and can contribute to a consumer attitude of \u201dreplace rather than repair.\u201d As the researchers note, while dematerialization “may be the case on a per-unit basis, the increasing number of units produced can cause an overall trend toward materialization with time.” And then there are all-new devices as well: according to Apple<\/a>, the lifecycle carbon footprint of an iPhone involves the emission of 121 pounds of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions over the course of a three year expected lifetime of use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While IT services might lead to improvements in a number of ways — thanks to developments such as videoconferencing, telework, and electronic commerce — it’s difficult to draw a straight line connecting these services to an overall reduction in environmental impact, according to some scientists<\/a> who have looked at the issue. While IT can improve the efficiency of existing operations and create new, more efficient ways of doing the same things, “having the means to use less materials does not mean that they will be adopted, nor does it guarantee that their adoption will actually lead to dematerialization.” As an example, despite the arrival of personal computers and other electronic services such as email, the total consumption of paper has doubled since 1950<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So while dematerialization has promise as a mitigating factor in climate change — and the contributions of the IT industry on that score are many — it is far from being a panacea, since the effects of such changes in the IT business can be more than counterbalanced by contrary activity elsewhere in the global economy.<\/p>\n

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If climate-change experts are correct in thinking that we could be close to a “tipping point” that might accelerate the already substantial climate change we’ve seen to date, the pressure to find solutions is sure to intensify. One of the potential mitigating factors is something that economists and scientists like to call “dematerialization.” Simply put, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “It’s all about dematerialization”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4501"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258174,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4501\/revisions\/258174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}