Carbon Footprint of ICT Devices

The carbon footprint for ICT, including TVs and other consumer electronics, rises to 1.2–2.2 GtCO2e (2.1%–3.9% of global GHG emissions) in 2020 with ca. 30% coming from embodied emissions and 70% from use phase emissions.

Across studies, roughly 23% of ICT’s total footprint is from embodied emissions, yet the share of embodied emissions for user devices specifically is ca. 50%. This is because, unlike networks and data centers, user devices are only used for parts of the day and use less electricity, but are exchanged often, especially in the case of smartphones.

Production is today around 20% of ICTs footprint but there is room for improving the precision.

The global embodied emissions of selected ICT user devices for 2020 were estimated to 180 Mtonne CO2e (excluding use and end of life), by combining the Supply Chain approach gathering data for the entire electronics sector and allocating it to user devices, with the LCA/PCF approach scaling product level data with annual sales/shipments.

FIGURE 1. Majority of computing’s carbon footprint comes from embodied emissions not operational energy use. From iPhone 3  to iPhone 12, the operational footprint reduced by 2.09 given efficiency optimizations while the embodied emissions rose by  2.85 due to higher manufacturing overheads. Between 2010 and 2018, the operational energy consumption of data centers  increased by only 6% collectively while the number of compute instances, i.e., infrastructure overheads, increased by 6.

In contrast, Figure 1 (right) shows the carbon footprint breakdown for data centers. At the data-center scale, we find operational emissions between 2010 and 2018 have increased by 6% while infrastructure capacity, which correspond to embodied hardware emissions, has increased by 6 .

FIGURE 3. Breakdown of carbon emissions for various Apple, Google, and Microsoft personal-computing platforms. As the top  chart shows, hardware manufacturing dominates the carbon output for battery-powered devices (e.g., phones, wearables, and  tables); most emissions for always connected devices (e.g., laptops, desktops, and game consoles) come from product use. The  bottom chart shows the absolute carbon output of battery powered and always connected devices. Overall, carbon footprint  (total, manufacturing, and use) is variable and scales with the platform.

In most cases, the “embodied emissions” (all stages excluding the use stage) of software are not significant compared with the overall emissions of the ICT system, particularly when the embodied emissions caused by development of the software are amortized over a large number of copies. In these cases, it is not necessary to carry out a detailed life cycle assessment of the software as part of a wider system.

Examples of business-to-consumer ICT hardware life cycle stage ratio profiles

Examples of business-to-business ICT hardware life cycle stage ratio profiles