( C ) Data centres and smartphones will be the most damaging information and communications technologies (ICT) to the environment by 2040, according to new research from W Booth School’s Lotfi Belkhir. At the end of winter term in 2014, Lotfi Belkhir was approached by a student taking his Total Sustainability and Management course who asked, “What does software sustainability mean?” The Entrepreneurship and Innovation Associate Professor at the W Booth School of Engineering Practice and Technology didn’t have an answer. Belkhir teaches students to think creatively about sustainability tools that can be applied to their ventures. But his tools, at the time, mainly applied to hardware, not software. The student’s question inspired Belkhir’s latest research on the global emissions footprint of information and communications technology. Belkhir, along with Ahmed Elmeligi, a recent W Booth graduate and co-founder of HiNT (Healthcare Innovation in Neuro Technology), studied the carbon footprint of consumer devices such as smartphones, laptops, tablets, desktops as well as data centres and communication networks as early as 2005. Their findings were published in the Journal of Cleaner Production. Not only did they discover that software is driving the consumption of ICT, they also found that ICT has a greater impact on emissions than we thought and most emissions come from production and operation. “For every text message, for every phone call, every video you upload or download, there’s a data centre this happen.” Belkhir explains. “Telecommunications networks and data centres consume a lot of energy to serve you and most data centres continue to be powered by electricity produced by traditional fuels. It’s the energy consumption we don’t see.” Among all the devices, trends suggest that by 2020, the most damaging devices to the environment are smartphones. While smartphones consume little energy to operate, 85% of their emissions impact comes from production. A smartphone’s chip and motherboard ( 芯片和主板 ) require the most amount of energy to produce as they are made up of precious metals that are mined at a high cost. Smartphones also have a short life which drives further production of new models and an extraordinary amount of waste. Belkir has made policy recommendations based on his findings. “Communication and data centres have to go under renewable energy now. The good news is Google and Facebook data centres are going to run on renewable energy. But there needs to be a policy in place so that all data centres follow. Also, it’s not sustainable to have a two-year plan for smartphones.”