7-R model and green ICT: tools promising sustainable future and solutions to climate change

Abstract

“The problem of climate change is so large that it can't be solved by voluntary individual responses. It requires an economy-wide solution that limits the total carbon intake of the economy.” - Peter Barnes a sustainable business innovator. This quote epitomizes the imperative to embark upon climate change and environmental degradation caused due to the resource consumption of our modern lives signifying us to preserve and create better environment for next generations. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), last decade (2001-2010) was officially proclaimed as the warmest decade, measuring averaged sea level 20 cm higher and most active decade in terms of tropical cyclone activity alarming the issue of sustainability. On the other dimension, information technologies have become more integral part of our lives than ever. Generations are trying to reach and to process huge size information leading to inventions and evolutions of technologies to increase efficiency of data processing; simultaneously on the other hand, advancements in hardware manufacturing are producing systems that are more powerful with increased performance but this race for data processing and communication is causing larger size carbon footprints on our environment than ever. We are on the edge of sustainability and must take corrective measures to ensure that the carbon footprints will shrink by minimizing Green House Gas (GHG) emission and hence defining new standards of green Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) by engineers, by academicians and by practitioners in order to meet objectives by practicing green approaches. ICT industry has two major challenges: to minimize its own footprint (2% of global carbon foot print) [1] and to minimize footprint (98%) caused by other units. In this paper I discuss the promising possibilities of use of ICTs to obtain green objectives - by practicing green use (minimizing energy consumption), disposal (reuse, recycle and refurbish), design (energy efficient), and production (with non-hazardous chemicals) of products. ICTs compromises of – end user devices (EUDs), telecommunication networks and data centers accounting for 25% (and growing) of global commercial energy consumption. EUDs has largest footprint with 59 percent of ICT emissions with Personal Computers (PCs) making 60 percent within it. SM represents saving opportunity at $20-$60/PC/year [2]. ICT application areas for achieving green objectives are spread over – industrial process automation, transport optimization, smart buildings/grids/motors/logistics and dematerialization (tele-working) suggesting total savings of 7.82 GtCO2e in GHG emissions by 2020 [3]. In this paper, I introduce the innovative 7-R model [4] of green practices that is the extension and improvement of traditional 3-R model – Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.