Paris (EFE) study published this Monday.
This increase is explained by the foreseeable increase in the number of devices, but also by the increase in their use, which in turn requires greater data center capacity, which could represent 22% of the gas emissions causing the change climate in the middle of the century.
The Agency for the Environment and Energy Control (Ademe) and the Authority for the Regulation of Electronic Communications (Arcep), to which the French Government commissioned in 2020 an assessment of the environmental impact of digital activity, estimate that 79 % of carbon footprint comes from user devices.
In addition, 16% originates from data centers and the remaining 5% corresponds to telecommunications networks.
If the analysis is made for the contamination that is generated in each phase of the equipment life cycle, 78% is due to manufacturing, 1% to distribution and 21% to its use, which includes the use networks and data centers.
The great impact of CO2 emissions from digital activity
These figures show the great weight that devices have in the environmental impact of digital activity.
In fact, each Frenchman on average generates 301 kilos of waste for this activity on the Internet, which in turn implies the use of 949 kilos of resources for the manufacture of different devices.
According to the estimates of the authors of the study, in France there were nearly 800 million connected objects of different types in 2020, but the bulk of the carbon footprint was the responsibility of mobile phones, televisions and computers.
Ademe and Arcep have developed several scenarios for their projections on the horizon of 2030 and 2050, which differ by the lengthening of the equipment’s useful life thanks to its eco-conception, its repair or lower consumption.
These scenarios also depend on the limitation of the number of equipment, the use of refurbished products, the fact of sharing equipment or its progressive replacement by others that require fewer resources, for example by reducing the size of the screens.