A high-level estimate of the material footprints of the ICT and the E&M sector

This paper attempts to make a high-level estimate of the material footprints of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Entertainment and Media (E&M) sectors for one year from four different perspectives while including the full life cycle of products and applying a top-down perspective. The four perspectives explored are: i) amount of materials used; ii) carbon footprint of the materials focusing on Raw Materials Acquisition (RMA) and End of Life Treatment (EoLT) stages; iii) material resource depletion; and iv) toxicity of materials. For the given assumptions, it is estimated that the sectors represent about 0,5% of the global annual usage of the selected materials, and for several materials (indium, gallium and germanium), ICT and E&M usage represents as much as 80-90% of the overall usage. Their use of materials represents about 0.9% of the carbon footprint for the selected materials, and about 0.1% of the total global carbon footprint, while the sectors material resource depletion potential is estimated to be between 13% and 48% of overall global depletion for the selected materials, depending on impact assessment method. Finally, the for toxicity of the selected materials, plus cement production, ICT and E&M are estimated to represent about 3.3%, based on ReCiPe. Toxicity and resource depletion results and the mass result for specific materials all indicate that the ICT and E&M sectors play a larger role than their average share of the total annual materials usage indicates, and gold and copper are identified as the most impacting materials. The applied top-down method provide only coarse estimates and further research is needed based on bottom-up methods. Keywords—ICT, ICT sector, E&M, E&M sector, EEE, material footprint, material carbon footprint, resource depletion potential, mass, toxicity EPiC Series in Computing Volume 52, 2018, Pages 168–186 ICT4S2018. 5th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Sustainability B. Penzenstadler, S. Easterbrook, C. Venters and S.I. Ahmed (eds.), ICT4S2018 (EPiC Series in Computing, vol. 52), pp. 168–186