Follow a device across its whole lifecycle (making, shipping, using, discarding). Each stage leaves pollution or waste. A systems view counts all of it, including the stages before and after the device is in use.
Pollution is the release of harmful substances into air, water, or soil; waste is the discarded material itself. Digital systems generate both, at a scale that grows with every upgrade.
Separate impacts (already emitted or dumped) from implications (growing risk and opportunity as volumes rise), and ask who is exposed, since the burden falls unevenly.
E-Waste: The Fastest-Growing Waste Stream
A discarded device becomes e-waste, the world's fastest-growing domestic waste stream.
The UN's Global E-waste Monitor recorded about 62 million tonnes in 2022, with under a quarter formally collected and recycled; the rest is landfilled, burned, or shipped abroad.
Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana became the symbol of the trade: workers burned cables and broke devices by hand, releasing lead and mercury into soil, water, and their bodies.
Authorities cleared the site in 2021, but the trade scattered into smaller workshops, moving the contamination rather than ending it. Yet a tonne of phones holds far more gold than a tonne of ore, a real urban-mining opportunity.
Through power and space, e-waste flows from higher- to lower-income countries, exporting harm to where oversight is weaker. Regulators act under the Basel Convention.
Designed Not to Last
Planned obsolescence is building devices that become obsolete sooner than they need to: glued-in batteries, repair-resistant parts, and updates that drop support for or slow older models.
Apple's 2017 admission that it slowed older iPhones with ageing batteries led to settlements worth hundreds of millions; since then Apple opened self-service repair and the EU moved to require replaceable batteries and longer software support.
Impact: shorter device lives, more waste, repeated cost to buyers. Implication: a growing right-to-repair movement pushes back, though faster product cycles drive sales the other way.
Through power the maker controls a product's useful life; through change, ask whether each upgrade is real progress or just a new reason to buy.
The Carbon and Chemical Footprint
The ICT sector is roughly 2 to 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, comparable to aviation and rising. For many phones, most of the footprint is locked in during manufacture, before the device is switched on.
Manufacturing is chemically intensive: chip fabrication uses potent fluorinated gases and ultra-pure water, and mining leaves polluted runoff. Devices and data centres add local heat, light, and noise.
The footprint spans a global supply chain, so no single meter captures it, and emissions made in one country serve users in another. Past emissions cannot be undone, and the total volume continues to rise.
Green Computing and Circular Design
Green computing designs, uses, and disposes of digital systems with less environmental cost: energy-efficient chips and cooling, longer software support, modular repairable design.
Fairphone (Dutch) sells modular phones with replaceable parts and around eight years of updates, built against planned obsolescence; since 2025 EU rules require repairability and long-term spare parts market-wide. AI sorting separates mixed e-waste.
This points toward a circular economy, where materials are repaired, reused, and recycled. Gains are real, but so are risks of greenwashing and rebound, where cheaper, efficient use means more of it.
Through systems, a fix in one place can shift the problem elsewhere, so judge net effect; through values and ethics, who is responsible for a device across its whole life?
Weighing a Contested Balance
Contested: digital systems are a large, fast-growing source of pollution and waste. The same industry also builds the tools now used to measure and cut that footprint.
The cost is not sealed at the factory. It shifts with later decisions: repairable hardware, right-to-repair laws, recovery capacity, and stopping consumption outpacing every efficiency gain. Those choices shape how large the waste stream becomes.
Case study
System: Fairphone, a modular smartphone by a Dutch social enterprise, drawing on the computers and networks topics: standard hardware deliberately designed so users can open it and swap parts with one screwdriver.
Specifics: The Fairphone 6 (2025) earns a perfect 10 out of 10 iFixit repairability score, has a user-replaceable battery and swappable screen and cameras, about eight years of updates and a five-year warranty; the company publishes repair guides, sells spare parts, and uses fairer-sourced and recycled materials.
Impacts and implications: Impacts: buyers keep and repair phones longer and cheaply, and Fairphone pushed repairability up the industry agenda. Implications: it proved an alternative to planned obsolescence possible, and from June 2025 EU right-to-repair and ecodesign rules require repairability labels, guaranteed spare parts, and (from 2027) replaceable batteries; Fairphone stays small and premium, so direct share is limited.
Concepts: power (control over lifespan returns to the user), values and ethics (long life and fair sourcing as design goals), systems (repairability is one lever amid demand, regulation, disposal). Environmental context with economic and political links.
Theory of Knowledge
Theory of knowledge
How do we know the true environmental footprint of a device?
A lifecycle assessment adds up emissions and waste from mining to disposal, but the result depends on where the boundary is drawn and which figures, often the maker's, are trusted. When the same firms cause and measure the harm, whose account counts?
Active recall
Self review
Distinguish pollution from waste, giving a digital example of each.
Explain, through power, why e-waste often flows from richer to poorer countries.
Give one impact and one implication of planned obsolescence.
Name one way digital systems worsen pollution and waste and one way they reduce it, and say why the balance is contested.
