Page 77 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

62 J. LEWIS

Apple has shown a particular flair for, in effect, celebrating the short life
span of its products, turning each new product launch into a media event.
While ideas of human progress have, for some time, been linked to
technological development, the fanfare that now marks the impending
death of fairly new devices amounts to a small but significant ideological
shift. We are asked to measure progress entirely in consumerist terms:
rather than evaluate the extent to which a new technology advances the
human condition—either individually or collectively—we are encouraged
to see progress as a conveyer belt of product upgrades (Lewis 2013).
The damaging environmental consequences of this hyper-production
cycle are its dirty little secret. We are used to measuring energy use purely
in terms of individual consumption, aware of the resources it takes to
power devices, but oblivious to the resources used in their manufacture and
disposal. This conceals the real environmental costs of our upgrade econ-
omy. A report by the Restart project (2015) on the iPhone 6 indicated
that:

Eighty five percent of the estimated 95 kg of CO 2 emitted during its entire
lifecycle (manufacture, use and ideally recycling) occurs at the manufacturing
stage. The estimated manufacturing footprint of 80 million iPhone 6 pro-
jected to be sold (6,460 kilotonnes) will be greater than the total annual
carbon footprint of the London boroughs of Westminster, Lambeth and
Camden – of over 770,000 people and all of the business activity in three
central areas of one of the world’s richest cities. The iPhone 6 use-phase
footprint, the energy used to charge and operate the mobiles—accounting
for only 11% of those 95 kg—is almost insignificant in comparison.

Behind these slim and sleek devices are a series of heavy industrial processes
in mining and manufacturing. So, for example, the average PC and
monitor requires the same volume of resources to build as an SUV (Kuehr
and Williams 2003) and the toxicity of the production processes mean that
some of the most hazardous waste sites in the US lie beneath the fash-
ionable surface of Silicon Valley (Gabrys 2007). Once built, new gadgets
blaze brightly but briefly before being dumped on rapidly growing
mountains of toxic e-waste.
The problem, in other words, has less to do with the power hungry
nature of media and communications devices than with the business model
that requires their rapid replacement. The World Bank’s optimism about
the role of ICTs in reducing carbon emissions comes crashing up against