Welcome back.
Today we will be talking about life cycle assessment which is a way of understanding
the impact of various different objects on the world around us.
I am going to start off by using the example of an iPhone.
In fact, Don and I right now are shooting this video on an iPhone.
Here you see a picture of an iPhone.
This is an example of technology that is used by millions of people around the world, and
it has a lot of different impacts on the world.
There are a range of different impacts.
On one hand it affects the ways in which I communicate.
It changes how much I use my land line.
I actually do not have a land line anymore.
It affects the mining of different materials around the world.
So, there are all sorts of different impacts of different types from each one of these
iPhones.
First off, there are materials that it is made out of.
It is made out of various bits of glass and different metals and coltan and all sorts
of different kinds of stuff, and these materials need to come from somewhere, and they need
to be shipped together, and they need to be transformed and assembled in very specific
ways in order to have the functionality of an iPhone.
In particular, that manufacturing process needs to be at a very high level of precision.
It's very easy to make a circuit board in a way that doesn't work and so many of them
get discarded in the manufacturing process.
IPhones also lead to a variety of different substitutions.
For example, people might not like letters because they instead send an e-mail, and so
this shifting of communication and of style of communication can have a very big impact
on the world.
There is also a range of interactions that this device has with other aspects of the
world.
For example, I use my iPhone for navigation and that keeps me from having to drive extra
distances because I can now map out my route from place to place and not get lost as much,
albeit Don and I did get lost on our way up to visit Ruth (McGill) for one of our videos.
One of the mechanisms by which you can assess the impact of a given piece of technology,
or any other thing actually for that matter, is called lifecycle assessment.
Lifecycle assessment is a process that involves four main elements.
The first is called goal and scope, and this involves specifying the object to study.
What is it that you are trying to assess?
The second is an inventory.
This is a process of data collection and modeling where you go through various different aspects
of this object and do an inventory of the kinds of impacts it has.
The third is called an impact assessment where you evaluate the contributions to the various
impact categories that you have defined.
The final stage is interpretation.
Based on your values and the values of the stakeholders how does this impact compare
to the impact of other things or what you were expecting?
With regard to the goals and scope, the core question is what impact categories are you
trying to assess?
For example, are we assessing air pollution or are we assessing the effects on particular
species or ecosystems?
One real challenge with lifecycle assessment is how do you decide where to end the analysis?
In terms of the iPhone are we assessing the change in quality of life of the people who
used to work in the post office before the post office laid them off because fewer letters
were sent?
Is that within scope?
Often it's not.
Somewhere you have to draw a boundary because at the extreme of it everything is connected
to everything else in at least an indirect way.
So, at some point to do a meaningful lifecycle assessment you need to scope the problem.
You can't deal with every possible interdependency that exists.
With regard to the inventory, the question is how do we collect the data?
What is our mechanism?
How do we go about finding out these measurements of the world?
How do we predict the future effects?
That's one of the things that modeling is good for, computational modeling in particular,
is taking the way things are now and projecting them into the future and seeing how it is
likely to emerge.
The third category is impact assessment.
How do these data and models allow us to populate the various impact categories?
The final one, interpretation, you have to figure out who are the stakeholders in the
system and which stakeholders get to decide which levels of impact are acceptable?
The question of who is a stakeholder is a really important one.
Ultimately in the iPhone I'm a stakeholder because I own one.
Every Apple shareholder is a stakeholder because they benefit from the production of iPhones,
but for example in the production of coltan, which we will be talking about more later
on, there is mining that goes on in the Congo and are the miners in the Congo stakeholders?
I would say that they are, but at some point is the family of the miner's part of a stakeholder?
At some point you need to scope the problem and draw boundaries around it.
One way to think about the impact of different products is called cradle to grave, looking
at it from the moment that it is dug out of the earth.
So, effectively its cradle using the metaphor of a living thing, that it is dug out of the
earth at one point, and then these raw materials are transformed and they are made into a consumer
product.
Then the consumer product is used and then it is eventually put in the trash and then
enters the waste stream and goes to a landfill or is recycled.
This process is called cradle to grave, so from he beginning to the end its movement
through the productivity cycle.
However, there are some architects named McDonough and Braungart who have suggested that there
is a different way you should think about this.
Rather than cradle to grave you should think about it as cradle to cradle, that every waste
stream from every product should be the input to a different production cycle.
This way rather than looking it as we dig stuff out of the ground, we use it, and then
we throw it away, looking at there being these cycles of connectivity that bring all the
different products into connection with each other.
So looking at IT systems, what are some of the special resources that IT systems use?
They use an assortment of raw materials so metal and plastic to make the devices themselves.
They also use quite a bit of power in order to make them able to do the things they do.
What I mentioned before, coltan, is a mineral that is mined in the Congo.
The mining of coltan is done under one might say questionable circumstances.
It's heavily implicated in the civil war that is going on in the Congo and in various different
human rights problems that exist there.
There is also a variety of environmental implications.
For example, there are endangered gorillas that are sometimes eaten in the process by
the miners of coltan.
In terms of the impacts of IT, there are various different product processes so the manufacturing
the chips and all of the different pieces that go into it.
There is also the packaging and the distribution of these products, and these take place across
wide distances in the world.
For example, the coltan is mined in the Congo and shipped to China where it is manufactured
and then shipped to the U.S. where I use it, and that is its production.
It travels quite a bit of distance, and so one of the impacts is all of the fossil fuels
or whatever energy is used to do all of that transportation from one spot to another.
So, something I would like to ask you to do would be to go find a video.
They are called unboxing.
Go and find an unboxing video of your phone or some other piece of technology that you
use regularly and watch it with an eye to the materials used.
For example, with the iPhone they talk about the beautiful suction that comes from the
box as you lift up the cover, and they go through in loving detail all of the different
objects that you might find in that box.
I would like you to look at it for your phone or other device with an eye to where those
things came from.
Where did the iPhone come from, or where did the plastic that forms the box come from,
or where did the inks that go into the printing come from?
Where did all these aspects that aren't even part of the iPhone, they're just the window
dressing, just the packaging for it, where did they come from as well as the device itself?
This gets into a question of carbon footprint.
This is how much C02, how much carbon dioxide which is the main greenhouse gas, is emitted
into the atmosphere because of that device?
This then is a piece of how much C02 is emitted because of everything else in your life.
The food that you eat, the devices you use, the transportation you engage in, the technology
that brings this class to you, the energy that you are using to plug your computer in.
All of these things contribute to the carbon footprint that you have the earth.
There are other questions about whether or not certain things should count as part of
your product footprint.
For example, if you are a U.S. citizen should you be accountable for 1/300,000,000 of the
carbon footprint of the U.S. Government and the U.S. Military?
If not, who is accountable for that?
So, computation is a growing part of people's carbon footprint.
Right now computational devices, information technology, takes up about 2% to 2-1/2% of
the energy that is used around the world.
So, the computational footprint relates closely to the carbon footprint.
The bigger your computational footprint, the bigger that chunk of your carbon footprint
is.
On a lot of people's e-mails, especially business people, they have a little tagline that says
please consider the environment before printing this e-mail because a lot of business people
are sort of old fogies who the first thing they do when an e-mail comes is they have
their assistant print it.
Then they put it on their desk and then they look at on a piece of paper like they were
expecting.
So, please consider the environment before printing this e-mail is meant to be a way
to keep people from using up so much paper, but given the computational footprint that
various different ways of living have I wonder if it would be interesting at the bottom of
your e-mail to say please consider the environment before using this Internet.
How does the IT that we use affect our carbon footprint and then our impact on the environments
in which we live?
Thank you very much.