Keywords

2.1 Introduction

Since the introduction of the first microprocessor in the 1970s, the pervasive influence of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has reshaped the fabric of society. With regard to the environment, it is often assumed that ICTs can potentially be used to promote sustainability (Gholami et al., 2016; Malhotra et al., 2013), e.g., through the dematerialisation of the economy, optimisation of industrial processes and promoting sustainable behaviours and practices (Fors, 2019; Zapico, 2013). However, currently ICTs are predominantly used for other reasons, such as to boost economic performance, thereby intensifying the environmental impact of the technology (Lennerfors et al., 2015). Therefore, it is vital that the technology itself is sustainable in its production, use and disposal, which is currently not the case. On the contrary, ICT presents a variety of challenges concerning environmental sustainability, including the generation waste and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions (Forti et al., 2020; Koot & Wijnhoven, 2021; Kreps & Fors, 2020; Perzanowski, 2022). While the potential for using ICT as green tech (greening by ICT) is by far greater in theory and often emphasised in contemporary discourse, we advocate for maintaining a strong focus on the greening of ICT itself and its value chain(s).

This chapter provides an overview of the environmental concerns of ICT and a historical narrative of these concerns in research and practice since the 1960s. The review methodology is inspired by the hermeneutic approach (Boell & Cecez-Kecmanovic, 2014). We argue that the battle to consider even a human environmental context for information systems (IS) took so long, and other developments such as the advent of the Internet took up so much of scholars’ attention, that the impact of ICT on the non-human environment only began to be appreciated in the IS literature after the turn of the millennium. We chart the change in conceptualisation of Green IT from being concerned largely with energy efficiency and cost-effectiveness, to a Green IT that emphasises user behaviours reflecting the changing perception of digital sustainability. The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows. Section 2.2 presents the current environmental challenges of the ICT value chain. Section 2.3 provides a historical narrative of environmental concerns within the ICT industry since the advent of ICT. Section 2.4 turns the attention to emerging trends, and to those concerns we deem likely to be of most significance in the field of Green IT in the coming years. Finally, Sect. 2.5 concludes the chapter with some final remarks.

2.2 The Environmental Impact of ICT Along Its Value Chain

Producing, using and disposing of ICT will always cause some level of environmental harm, due to the physical nature of these products. The impacts of these activities may range in their degree of harm and, at best, be climate neutral, but they can never contribute positively to environmental sustainability (Aebischer & Hilty, 2015; Berkhout & Hertin 2021). Greening of ICT—or simply Green IT in its original formulation (Murugesan, 2008)—primarily focusses on minimising the environmental impacts associated with ICT across the entire value chain. The value chain of ICT products refers to the distinct phases of extraction of raw materials, design, manufacturing and transportation, use and disposal (Fors, 2019). The following subsections summarise the more harmful impacts associated with ICT along its value chain.

2.2.1 Extraction of Raw Materials

ICT devices are known for their complex material composition. A single smartphone requires 75 different elements to produce, ranging from plastic and copper to 16 of the 17 known rare earth elements (REEs) (Humphries, 2016). While one device weighs approximately 128 grams (Merchant, 2017), its production necessitates the extraction of 34 kilograms of ore from the earth. This implies that roughly 99.97% of the material extracted ends up as waste even before the device is disposed of. Many ICT companies like to point out that their products consist of recycled materials. Intel, which is one of the more outspoken ICT companies in terms of their sustainability efforts, often talks about the circularity of their products and business models (Intel, 2022). Apple (2022), often described as the industry leader in terms of sustainability, proudly presented in a recent sustainability report that they used up to 20% recycled materials in their products, meaning that 80% of the material used in the 225 million iPhones and the 26 million MacBooks they sold in 2022 were virgin materials. The waste generated from mining activities can be toxic and pollute the land, air and water supplies in areas where the ore is mined. Furthermore, industrial-scale mining activities often make use of machinery powered by fossil fuels, which contribute to climate change.

When ore is refined into useful materials, there are other environmental issues that need to be taken into consideration. Refining ore is a water-intensive process that threatens local supplies of drinking water (Meißner, 2021). Furthermore, it creates various by-products that, if not properly handled, can seep into nearby surroundings, leading to environmental damage and posing health risks to individuals exposed to the waste (Perzanowski, 2022). The fact that many of the materials used in ICTs are extracted in developing countries, while the products themselves are mainly used in developed countries, results in an unequal exchange of resources and environmental impacts between rich and poor nations (Hornborg, 2001; Lennerfors et al., 2015).

The ICT industry is heavily reliant on conflict minerals, such as tin, tantalum, tungsten, gold (3TGs) (Fitzpatrick et al., 2015) and to some extent coltan (Bleischwitz et al., 2012). These minerals are often sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where ICT companies run the risk of funding militarised groups that control artisanal mines in conditions akin to modern-day slavery. Many ICT companies have claimed that to stop sourcing from the DRC is not a viable alternative (Patel, 2016), and instead the region has been described as a laboratory for various sustainable supply chain initiatives. However, the widespread corruption in the country prevents transparency, leading researchers to assume that these companies may still be indirectly supporting the conflicts (Aula, 2020). While the problem of conflict minerals is mainly a social issue, it may also have some implications for environmental sustainability, since the corruption and the political fragility and instability of the areas prevent policies and frameworks for environmentally conscious extraction (Rhode, 2019).

2.2.2 Design, Manufacturing and Transportation

Designing and manufacturing ICT devices is both electricity and water intensive, and will always result in various streams of waste and by-products that need to be handled (Arushanyan, 2016). In the case of most devices, particularly smaller ones such as laptops and smartphones, the bulk of their carbon footprint has already been generated before they reach the hands of the consumer (Perzanowski, 2022). For an iPhone, approximately 81% of its total emissions stems from processes involving the extraction of raw materials, production, manufacturing and the transportation of the device (Greenly Institute, 2023), depending on the electricity mix where the iPhone will later be used and the length of its useful life. While the total figure is quite modest—approximately 70kg of CO2 throughout its lifecycle—the immense number of units sold globally translates to a significant overall environmental impact. A laptop, which generally lasts longer than a smartphone but generates more emissions in the use phase, emits approximately 200–500kg of CO2 emissions as it is manufactured (Belkhir & Elmeligi, 2018). Freitag et al. (2021) suggest that for most user devices (e.g., laptops and smartphones), approximately half of the emissions are ‘embedded’, meaning that they occur in the extraction and manufacturing phase. Today, especially the production of Solid State Drives (SSDs) is extremely carbon intensive compared with conventional mechanical hard drives (Tannu & Nair, 2023).

Because of the complex material composition of ICT devices, materials need to be sourced from all around the globe, leading to increased emissions from transportation both upstream and downstream in their supply chains. Intel, for instance, contracts more than 9000 suppliers located in 89 different countries to, among other things, supply the materials for their manufacturing process (Intel, 2021). Most materials and components are transported using oceangoing ships that emit not only CO2 but other pollutants such as sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides (Stathatou et al., 2022). Although oceangoing vessels are known for their substantial pollution, their capacity to transport large loads results in per-unit emissions that are nearly negligible. Still, devices must be delivered to homes and offices, and this is often done using medium-duty freight vehicles that are much less efficient on a per-unit basis (Perzanowski, 2022). Amazon, a prominent player in the delivery of such devices, was responsible for a substantial 19 million metric tons of carbon emissions in a single year, primarily attributable to their logistics operations (Ivanova, 2019).

2.2.3 Use

ICTs in their use phase contribute to an increasing portion of CO2 emissions globally. Freitag et al. (2021) conclude that the global CO2 footprint of ICTs, in the use phase, contributes to somewhere between 1.8 and 2.8% of the global emissions, which is in line with early estimates by Gartner Institutes (Mingay, 2007). The emissions from most user devices have been lowered substantially over the past 20–25 years due to technological innovation and new legislation and policy, such as the Energy StarFootnote 1 and the TCO CertifiedFootnote 2 certifications. Still, as the total number of devices in use is constantly increasing, the overall emissions from ICT in this phase are still on the rise (Allianz, 2023).

While some research suggests that the overall emissions from ICT in the use phase might plateau due to energy-efficient servers and renewable energy sources (Malmodin, 2019), emissions from data centres currently contribute to a substantial portion of the overall CO2 emissions from ICT (Andre & Edler, 2015; Belkhir & Elmeligi, 2018). This is mainly attributed to the usage phase, as these devices are energy intensive and typically remain operational at all times (Freitag et al., 2021). Media streaming contributes to the increased demand of data centres, and emerging streaming-related practices and technologies, such as ultra-high definition (UHD) streaming (Schwarz, 2022), ‘media multitasking’ (Widdicks et al., 2019) and streamed video games (Marsden et al., 2020), may well result in increased emissions from data centres. Emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain are currently consuming immense amounts of electricity, with AI, in particular, expected to be a major driver of the rising electricity consumption within the ICT sector in the foreseeable future (Ferré, 2023). In a recent report, it is projected that, given current trends but assuming a relatively unchanged electricity mix, ICTs could generate emissions exceeding 830 metric tons (MT) of CO2 by 2030 (Allianz, 2023), surpassing even those of the airline industry. Nevertheless, there is a silver lining since the emissions from ICT usage are intricately linked to the composition of the electricity mix, implying that successful transitions to more sustainable energy systems by countries could substantially mitigate the adverse environmental effects of the ICT industry.

2.2.4 Disposal

ICT devices consist of complex material compositions, but also software, that make them difficult to repair, refurbish or recycle properly (Kreps & Fors, 2020). ICT companies also have very little incentive to produce long-lasting devices, as the business imperative is to have customers replace their devices with new ones as quickly as possible (Perzanowski, 2022). According to the European Commission (2023), ICT products are often disposed of prematurely, leading to 35 million tons of waste, 30 million tons of resource depletion and 261 million tons of GHG emissions within the European Union (EU) annually. For many decades, electronic waste (e-waste), which includes but is not limited to disposed ICT devices, has for a long time been the fastest-growing waste stream globally (Cucchiella, 2015). The waste is often toxic and can contain arsenic, lead, mercury and other toxins, and only approximately 15% of this waste undergoes proper recycling (Ruiz, 2023). The problem is also unequally distributed among the world system (Lennerfors et al., 2015). Despite measures to prevent illegal export of e-waste, much of the waste accumulated in the Global North is exported to the Global South as second-hand goods (Umair et al., 2016). Here, e-waste is informally recycled without proper tools or protective equipment, leading to workers being exposed to mercury fumes, dioxins and cadmium dust and pollutants released into both the air and water reserves (Prakash et al., 2012; Umair et al., 2016).

E-waste contains a significantly higher percentage of valuable materials compared to ore (Kreps & Fors, 2020). For example, one metric ton of circuit boards may hold between 40 and 800 times the quantity of gold and 30–40 times the amount of copper obtained from one metric ton of ore (Bizzo et al., 2014). Still, ‘urban mining’ has not yet become economically feasible in the developed world, primarily due to the low cost of sourcing virgin materials. This is just one of the many challenges that currently prevent circularity within the ICT industry. Traditionally, the focus has been on increasing the recycling rate, but as Perzanowski (2022) shows, the sheer amount of new e-waste accumulated each year greatly exceeds the capacity of the existing recycle infrastructure. It may therefore be more sensible to reduce the rate of e-waste accumulation by designing products with longer lifespans that can be easily repaired and upgraded. As expressed by Patrignani and Whitehouse (2014, p. 84), promoting environmentally friendly ICT necessitates embarking on a ‘quest to slow down the ICT lifecycle’.

2.3 The Evolution of Green IT and Sustainable ICT

Since the dawn of the environmental movement and the widespread adoption of ICT, in parallel with the emergence of the field of IS in the mid-twentieth century, the core ideas of Green IT have emerged—slowly, and at times against the odds—in research, practice, and policy. Furthermore, once established, there has been a gradual shift from Green IT to the more optimistic discourse of Sustainable ICT. The early days of ICT coincided with the rise of the environmental movement in the 1960s, and while global environmental concerns such as climate change were not yet on the agenda, these first two decades saw first an increased awareness of concerns such as electronic waste and toxic chemicals used in the production processes. Later, primarily due to the oil crisis, attention shifted to problems associated with the energy consumption of the large mainframes adopted by organisations worldwide (see Table 2.1). Some ICT companies during these decades implemented power-saving features and even recycled the heat from their data centres into the central heating system, or to heat nearby offices in order to save oil and money (Fors & Lennerfors, 2018). The focus on decreasing energy consumption of ICT continued in the 1980s and 1990s due to the rapid adoption of ICT, not least personal computers (PCs) with over dimensioned power supplies (Norford et al., 1988). An important realisation during these decades was that most ICT products consumed almost as much power in stand-by mode as when they were fully operational, and in particular in the 1990s, the reduction of stand-by losses became the leitmotif of policy activities in the field of ICT (Aebischer & Hilty, 2015), with examples such as Energy Star and TCO Certified. The increase in power consumption of ICT eventually gave rise to the concept of Green computing. Simpson (1996) noted computers as the fastest-growing electrical load in business, with a fivefold increase in energy consumption over a decade. E-waste policy was also becoming more refined during these decades, with the Basel ConventionFootnote 3 being adopted in 1989, which among other things banned the export of e-waste to developing countries. Given the growing concern for environmental sustainability within practice and policy in the 1980s and 1990s, surprisingly little attention was devoted to these issues within the academic field of ICT during this time. In the ensuing decades, public awareness grew regarding the significant contribution of the ICT industry to global CO2 emissions.

Table 2.1 Evolution of Green IT
Full size table

While energy-conserving features and strategies had been implemented earlier for cost-saving purposes, it was in the 2000s and 2010s that the link between ICT and global warming became widely recognised. Melville (2010) highlights that environmental sustainability was notably absent from the contents of the ‘basket of 8’ IS journals until as late as 2003, and in 2007—when Elliot (2007, p. 109) suggested that ‘environmental sustainability of ICT should be seen as a sustainable topic in the mainstream of IS research’—the concept of Green IT emerged. One could say that it originated as a response to diverse environmental issues associated with ICT, encompassing concerns like e-waste and the widespread use of various chemicals in the industry. However, its primary emphasis and key selling point were addressing the climate impact of ICT, which at the time was estimated at two percent of the global emissions (Mingay, 2007). This marked a sudden realisation for the IS field where positivist approaches, for many decades, had in various aspects been complicit in the ICT-related factors contributing to climate change (Kreps, 2018). The introduction of the concept grouped pre-existing strategies for fostering environmentally sustainable ICT practices under the umbrella of Green IT (Murugesan, 2008). While mitigating the negative effects of ICT was the main objective for Green IT initiatives in the early days, the potential of ICT to be used to promote sustainability in other areas of society, for example through the use of videoconferencing and telepresence technologies, or through carbon accounting and tracking (Mingay, 2007), was soon recognised.

Although this facet was initially associated with Green IT, subsequent perspectives generally classify it under Green IS or Sustainable ICT. This more optimistic discourse grew rapidly after the introduction of Green IT, not least with the help of the Global e-Sustainability Initiative’s (GeSI) inaugural SMART series reports. Well-received by industry professionals, policymakers and scholars, these reports highlighted the potential of the ICT sector to enhance the sustainability of society as a whole, suggesting that ICT-based solutions decrease CO2 emissions by up to 20% globally by 2030 (GeSI, 2015). A few years later, UNEP’s International Resource Panel published a comprehensive report outlining steps for achieving sustainable development. The report emphasised the role of ICTs and technological solutions in decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions, promoting environmental sustainability alongside maintained economic growth (Hilty et al., 2011; UNEP, 2011). We argue that this optimistic discourse about the relation between ICT and sustainability took over in the late 2000s. However, in the 2020s—perhaps due to reports of massive emissions stemming from data centres worldwide as the result of video streaming, training AI models and maintaining cryptocurrencies—the main arguments of Green IT are regaining relevance.

2.4 The Relevance of Green IT Today and in the Future

Here we present a sample of contemporary issues that are currently emphasised in research, practice and policy. The majority of these aspects are not new per se, but interest in them has been renewed due to recent events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the rise of emerging technologies and the (un)availability of raw materials resulting from various geopolitical tensions.

2.4.1 The Environmental Effects of Emerging Technologies

Since the late 2010s there has been a rapid development of AI, blockchain, Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR and VR). These technologies alter how we engage with and navigate the boundaries between the virtual and the physical, and find applications across gaming, entertainment, education, healthcare and production. It is assumed that these technologies may help to further sustainability efforts in various ways in the future (Davis et al., 2023), including minimising the necessity for travelling (Krupnova et al., 2020; Talwar et al., 2022). However, they also present new sets of environmental challenges (Leffer, 2023).

AR and VR devices pose environmental challenges including the demand for rare and critical materials, and specifically new e-waste challenges due to device repair difficulties. This is because wearable devices need to be light and extremely compact, which limits the possibilities of repair (Perzanowski, 2022). For instance, it was recently found in a review of Apple’s new VR headset Apple Vision Pro by the Phone Repair Guru (2024) that the device is currently unrepairable.

While AI has seen extensive use in certain industrial sectors and in finance, healthcare and education, the general public started to encounter and actively engage with AI with the release of Large Language Models (LLMs) and various image generating applications. The penetration of these applications in society has given rise to discussions concerning ethics and sustainability. Van Wynsberghe (2021) and Crome et al. (2024) argue that research tends to focus on the potential of AI to solve various sustainability-related problems and overcome sustainability-related challenges in various sectors, including agriculture, banking, healthcare and energy. Coeckelbergh (2021), for example, argues that AI has the potential to help mitigate climate change and various other environmental concerns, and Ludvigsen (2023) shows how using AI models to write or to generate images could potentially save energy compared with manual labour. Still, as both Coeckelbergh (2021) and Van Wynsberghe (2021) show, the impact of AI on environmental sustainability is predominantly negative at present, since AI contributes to increased energy consumption. OpenAI has disclosed that it used 25,000 Nvidia GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) for 100 days, consuming approximately 50 Gigawatt hours (GWh)) of energy, in the process of training a single LLM, GPT-4 (Patel & Wong, 2023). Lai (2023) concludes that the energy used to train the specific language model is equivalent to the energy consumption of 1000 average US households over five-to-six years.

Blockchain technologies are perceived as potentially beneficial in supply chain management, voting systems and healthcare. Davis et al. (2023) present positive applications of blockchain for environmental sustainability, demonstrating instances such as utilising excess heat from data centres for wood drying and incentivising clean energy production. Today, the technology is mainly used to enable cryptocurrencies, most notably Bitcoin. Much research has focussed on the immense electricity consumption of this currency, which has been compared to that of a small country. The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (2024) recently estimated that the power demand of Bitcoin in 2023 was approximately 121.13 Terawatt hours (TWh). Limiting the negative climate impact of this immense electricity consumption, for example through transitioning towards more energy-efficient consensus algorithms, is therefore considered a high priority (Saleh, 2021; Varavallo et al., 2022).

2.4.2 The Environmental Impacts of the Data-Driven Digital Revolution

There is a widespread assumption that digitalisation generally will play a pivotal role in contributing to several of the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Initiatives to improve education, healthcare and clean energy production often rely heavily on ICT, especially on efficient transmission of data. Globally, the volume of data generated, captured, duplicated and consumed has increased almost exponentially, especially since the pandemic, from 41 zettabytes (ZB) in 2019 with a projected growth to 181 ZB in 2025 (Statista, 2023). While the growth in data generation and transmission can be attributed mainly to cloud computing and media streaming, we must now also take into account the high-performance computing power required to analyse the vast amounts of data generated by the Internet of Things (IoT) as more devices in both industries and households contribute to data generation and transmission (Gray, 2018). While access to new information provided by this data can identify important insights for decision making, the impact of this energy consumption is said to be in the region of 23% of the total CO2 emissions from ICT (Ganesan et al., 2020). Mitigating this huge increase, virtual machine consolidation in green cloud software engineering has been used to support energy-efficient cloud infrastructure (Ganesan et al., 2020). As the number of data centres multiplies to accommodate increasing demand, the use of cloud computing becomes ubiquitous, the greening of the cloud becomes even more important; this includes resource allocation mechanisms that aim to efficiently use and distribute cloud resources (Kumar et al., 2022).

While energy efficiency in data centres has increased significantly, the need for data transmission is increasing even faster, leading to increased climate impact in absolute terms (Andrae & Edler, 2015). Policy initiatives that aim to support data-driven initiatives are just starting (Lucivero et al., 2020). Organisations heavily dependent on data centres are often hesitant to disclose data on their environmental impact, as there are limited incentives for them to make such information publicly available (Crawford et al., 2019). In order to exploit the sustainability-related potential of the data-driven digital revolution, it is essential to address the escalating energy consumption of data centres globally. Therefore, the European Commission (2020a) has recently decided that energy-efficient cloud computing should be a top priority in Europe, and sets out to achieve climate-neutral data centre operations no later than 2030.

2.4.3 Circularity of ICT: Refurbishing and the Right to Repair

Perzanowski (2022) shows how manufacturers of technological devices have deliberately created obstacles, including design, business and legal barriers, to impede repairs, thus compelling consumers to buy new devices rather than extending the lifespan of their current ones. In 2020, the European Commission (2020b) adopted the new Circular Economy Action Plan (CEAP) that introduces initiatives along the value chain of different products, including ICTs. It targets how these products are designed and produced, used, reused and discarded. As part of the CEAP, European Commission (2023) recently adopted a new proposal aiming to promote the repair of electronic products. The proposal seeks to encourage more sustainable business models among manufacturers by instituting more extensive obligations. Various similar laws have been enacted in US states such as Minnesota, Massachusetts and New York.

Another related trend is refurbishing of ICT products, which refers to the practice of restoring pre-owned ICT devices to a like-new condition, often including repairs, upgrades and quality assurance checks. In recent years, companies have emerged in the EU and in the US that collect smartphones, laptops, servers and other ICT products that they refurbish and resell to both companies and private consumers. According to the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (ADEME, 2022), choosing a refurbished smartphone reduces, on average, waste by 89%, while also reducing water usage and CO2 emissions significantly. The demand for refurbished ICT increased during the COVID-19 pandemic as people transitioned to remote work and study, and had to acquire new laptops, headsets and webcams. Simultaneously, production challenges in China resulted in a decreased supply of newly produced ICTs, leading people to search for alternatives. Even before the pandemic, there was a shortage of certain components, particularly GPUs, attributed to the growing interest in Bitcoin mining (Lim & Wibowo, 2022). Given the continued volatility in the market due to various geopolitical concerns, it is safe to assume that the market for refurbished devices will continue to rise in the foreseeable future. In a recent report, CMI (2022) assessed the refurbished device market at about USD 52.34 billion in 2021 and anticipates it to rise to USD 64.10 billion in 2022, with a projected increase to roughly USD 146.43 billion by 2030.

2.5 Conclusion

Despite the environmental movement gaining momentum as early as the 1960s, the ICT industry largely avoided the level of criticism directed at other polluting sectors, at least until the mid-2000s (Lennerfors et al., 2015), when the concept of Green IT was first introduced and the field of IS started to emphasise these issues. Yet the topic of energy efficiency in ICT was a subject of discourse as far back as the 1970s during the oil crises (Fors & Lennerfors, 2018). The e-waste problem also started to gain increased attention in the 1970s, focussed on the hazardous substances that posed threats to human health and wildlife. Discussion of the human environment around ICTs in the 1970s and 1980s in the IS literature laid the groundwork to expand into consideration of the environment. Thus, in the historical narrative in this chapter we have presented how initiatives promoted by Green IT to improve the environmental sustainability of ICT had already been implemented and discussed to some extent within policy, research and practice albeit, usually, for economic, political or regulatory reasons or to promote social sustainability. Improved environmental sustainability played a relatively small part in the endeavours employed to make ICT green, until the mid-2000s, when environmental concerns began to be used to promote change. Even then, relatively few genuinely new solutions were developed or invented; instead, existing ideas were often repurposed, repackaged or recontextualised as Green IT (Fors, 2019).

For a relatively short period of time, Green IT focussed almost exclusively on mitigating the negative effects of ICT production, use and disposal (Murugesan, 2008). However, the concept acted as a bandwagon towards new understandings of and discourses about the intersection of ICT and environmental sustainability (Fors, 2019). This led to an eventual shift in discourse where ICT was described as having relatively minor negative impacts on the environment during production, use and disposal, but could contribute substantially to furthering environmental sustainability during its use phase (GeSI, 2015). This more favourable perspective on ICT and sustainability prevailed until new discussions about emerging technologies such as AI, blockchain, video streaming and cloud computing once again put the focus on the negative environmental impact of ICT due to its electricity use. Recent policy initiatives that prioritise the promotion of the circular economy emphasise extending the lifespan of ICT devices and encouraging repairability, with a specific emphasis on e-waste reduction (European Commission, 2023). We interpret that the pendulum is once more swinging towards a more active consideration of the negative impact ICT has on the environment.

To conclude, we argue that the potential for ICT to contribute to environmental sustainability remains mainly theoretical. Truly Sustainable ICT, with the power to greatly reduce the negative environmental impact of other polluting sectors of society, has, as of yet, not been deployed on a large scale, and it is difficult to say whether this potential will be unleashed (Börjesson Rivera, 2015). The long-term effects of certain technologies are difficult to foresee (Hallonsten, 2023), not least since their true impacts (or lack thereof) will reveal themselves only in decades to come, oftentimes in unexpected ways and contexts (Mazzucato, 2021). Therefore, we cannot be sure whether these emerging technologies will prove beneficial for environmental sustainability purposes or not. What we do know is that they currently pose a direct threat to the environment, today. We must therefore ensure that their direct negative effects along their respective value chains are mitigated, now.