AI Also Generates E-Waste; Fight Waste, Fix Stuff; Great Books to Gift!
and more about the human and environmental costs of renewable energy and digital technology —and how we can do better.
Another Thing AI Can Create: E-Waste
By now we’ve all heard about AI’s staggering energy consumption, and a few months ago I looked into the huge quantities of critical metals the technology is gobbling up. Now a new study* warns about yet another physical cost: in addition to all the images and text it generates in the virtual world, AI also generates lots of real-world trash, in the form of junked electronics.
The enormous digital systems that undergird AI run on computers housed in data centers. The equipment in those centers—computer servers, chips, hard drives, internet communication gear, power systems and more—breaks down, wears out, and needs to be upgraded with newer models all the time, like any other collection of machinery. And of course more such centers are now being built at a frenzied pace. The result is a growing pile of discarded AI electronics. In a recently published paper, a team of researchers from universities in China, Israel and the UK estimated that, depending on how fast AI use grows, from 2020 through 2030 the amount of e-waste the tech generates could range from 1.2 million metric tons to as much as 5 million metric tons. The total mass could reach the equivalent of tossing out 13 billion iPhones every year. If all that junk winds up dumped, like most of the Western world’s electronic trash is, it can leach all kinds of toxins into the soil and water. Not to mention all the critical metals that will simply be wasted.
Recycling the metals in all that trash would obviously be better. But even better than that, the study’s authors point out, would be keeping the equipment in use for longer, and then reusing still-working parts. That goes for pretty much all electronics, for that matter. The paper offers some specific suggestions for data center operators, like redeploying outdated pieces of gear to handle lower-intensity tasks. Extending the lives of components this way could cut the annual amount of e-waste by 62%, the authors say.
With all that in mind, I was glad to learn from E-Scrap News that Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud and AI division, has a sizable program devoted to reusing components from the countless server racks it retires each year. Earlier this month Amazon declared it has recycled or resold some 23 million components since last year. The company reused many of those items itself, satisfying 13% of its spare parts needs. They also claim to have improved maintenance practices enough that their average hard drives now last six years instead of five.
We could be reusing lots more of our electronic gadgets in similar fashion. A recent study in the UK of items ordinary folks dumped in recycling bins found that more than 36% were still working and could be reused on the spot, while an additional 10% needed only minor repairs. If that rate holds across the country, it means that more than 30,000 working electronic gadgets are tossed into recycling bins every week.
*Hat tip to E-Scrap News for alerting me to the study, and thanks to Peng Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for sharing a copy with me.
Fight Waste, Fix Stuff!
Of course, it’s much easier to keep your aging electronics in action if you can fix them when they stop working. However, especially when it comes to digital devices like phones, tablets and laptops, the default, at least in rich countries, is: when it breaks, just replace it. This is not an accident. It’s the result of corporate strategy designed to coax consumers into buying new things.
The electronics industry has for years deliberately made their products difficult to repair, including by refusing to give the public access to repair manuals, spare parts and necessary software. Finally, though, there’s a growing backlash that in recent years has begun to force electronics makers to change their ways. It’s a real people-power victory. How’d it happen? You can read all about it in this piece of mine recently published in Sierra Magazine.
Five(ish) Nonfiction Books That Make Great Gifts
The holidays are almost here, and if you’re like me, you need some last-minute gift ideas. Here are some solid picks for fans of true stories. (If you received this this list already in the e-mail blast I sent earlier this week, feel free to skip ahead!)
Naturally, my first recommendation is my own Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future. Sure, I’m being self-serving here, but I’m also giving you a hot tip: you can get the hardcover at indie-supporting Bookshop.org for 10% off right now, while Amazon is offering 20% off (and calling it “one of the best books of 2024”!).
OK, enough self-promotion. Here are four other books I recommend with all my might. I don't get any payment if you buy one—just the satisfaction of promoting good books, and banking some authorly karma.
If you’re looking for a lighter but nonetheless eye-popping read in the fact-stranger-than-fiction realm, you can’t ask for better than The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession. Throughout the late 1990s, a young Frenchman pilfered almost $2 billion worth of art and antiquities from museums across Europe—and sold none of them, choosing instead to keep them all in the room he shared with his girlfriend, for their exclusive pleasure. An enthralling true-crime procedural, fascinating character study, and feat of investigative journalism all in one package.
Garbage might not sound like the most enticing topic, but Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future is flat-out fascinating. Journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis climbed literal mountains of trash with waste-pickers in India, sloshed through sewers in the UK and waded through shoals of castoff clothes donated in the West only to be trashed in Africa to pull together the big picture of the world’s escalating waste crisis, and shine a light on the people working for a less wasteful future.
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World begins from left-wing firebrand author Naomi Klein’s surreal experience of being constantly confused with feminist-tuned-conspiracist author Naomi Wolf—bizarro “doubles” with similar names and public personae, active around similar issues but with radically different agendas. Klein’s personal tale of the social media-amplified disorientation, confusion and public hostility she went through as a result is engaging, disturbing, and sometimes very funny. But the book goes much further, expanding out to examine the rise and significance of mirror-image doppelgangers in politics, the wellness movement, social media and artificial intelligence.
The Ministry for the Future is technically a novel, but so deeply researched and solidly grounded in fact that I’m including it. Veteran sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson takes the realities of climate change as they are today and projects them just a few years into the future to paint an intricately detailed and harrowingly plausible vision of where we’re heading. You might want to give up in despair after the nightmarish first couple of chapters, but stick around—Robinson explores much more optimistic terrain as you get deeper into the book. All told, it’s the most thorough and convincing blueprint I’ve seen anywhere on how we can make it through the catastrophes ahead to a more stable future.
More News Worth Knowing
🚗 Trump Transition Team Wants to Gut Support for EVs, Clamp Down on Chinese Metals
🙅 Ukraine Delays Critical Metals Deal with US, Maybe So That Trump Can Take Credit
🌇 Texas is Building More Solar Than Any State. It Also Has the Dirtiest Electric Grid.
👿 DR Congo Files Criminal Complaint Against Apple Over Its Alleged Use of Conflict Minerals. No surprise, Apple Denies It
I’m taking off the next couple of weeks to celebrate all the holidays I can get away with! Merry Christmas, and happy Hannukah, Kwanzaa, New Year and everything else to all of you. See you in 2025!