Abstract
Information and communication technology (ICT) has the potential to reduce the impact of human activities on the environment. In order to fully understand the environmental benefits of ICT, the life-cycle impacts of computer systems must be compared with those of the products and services they replace. The questions of whether reading news on a handheld device rather than newspaper, or purchasing books from an online retailer instead of from a bookstore reduces environmental impact are two examples of this sort of comparison in the recent literature [123, 65, 100]. While, initially, the replacement of traditional products such as newspapers by a small fractional increase in the use of a handheld mobile device seems a winning environmental trade-off, there has been increasing concern over the large energy demands of the internet infrastructure, with data center energy demand in the U.S. reaching 1.5% of the national total in 2006 and estimates of 2011 demand surpassing 10 billion kWh [36].
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Boyd, S.B. (2012). Introduction. In: Life-Cycle Assessment of Semiconductors. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9988-7_1
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