Re: How many emissions in a GB?

Salut Frédéric!

I've had a chance to look at the excellent work in the repo you shared, and
in the Neoctet site (and share it with others!). The French community
continues to do fantastic work in this space, and I hope you are able to
increase the translations for wider visibility.

Reading the comparative study of in person vs virtual meetings was
fascinating and counter intuitive in some respects. Bravo.

I would definitely be interested in reading any work you can share on your
estimations from the LCA of the French site with the parameters you cited.

Would also be interested in learning more about how your LCA database
differs from the Big Ones that have become mainstream among LCA
practitioners.

Finally, I wonder how your estimates would account for providers like
Google, who claim full carbon neutrality,  and who have introduced, like
Cloudflare,  options to use exclusively renewable energy powered zones at
any given time.


On Mon, 22 Aug 2022, 02:43 Frédéric Bordage, <info@greenit.fr> wrote:

> Hello Ismael,
>
> Thanks for this try.
>
> There are several important points to notice.
>
> 1. No linearity
>
> Network.
> There's no linearity of environmental costs for fixed lines (DSL, fiber)
> and HDD. That means that we should better not divide a number of GB
> exchanged by the environmental cost of the infrastructure. This is
> nonsense.
> One the other hand, environmental impacts of 4G / 5G are much more linear.
>
> Storage.
> Same situation for storage. We should better not divide the environmental
> cost of producing and using an hardrive disk (HDD) by its capacity of
> storage. This is non linear.
> One the other hand, environmental impacts of SSD are much more linear.
>
>
> 2. LCA methodology
>
> From a methodological perspective, one should better use the Life Cycle
> Assessment (LCA approach) which is based on standards (ISO 14040 and ISO
> 14044) and is commonly used in most of the world to assess environmental
> impacts. In Europe, where I'm based, you must use this methodology to
> assess the environmental impact of digital stuff. See
> https://ec.europa.eu/environment/eussd/smgp/ef_methods.htm
>
>
> 3. NegaOctet and EcoIndex
> As part of the NegaOctet.org and EcoIndex (see https://github.com/cnumr/)
> projects, we already calculated an average environmental cost for a web
> page.  The first approach (NegaOctet) is based on an LCA modeling peer
> reviewed by a French public research body. The second project is based on
> another LCA of one of the top 10 French website.
>
> Environmental impacts already calculated:
> Write, send and read an email
> Watch 1 hour of streaming video
> Download or upload
> Store in the cloud
> Set up a webconference
> Set up a audioconference
> Search for an information
>
> For each of these functional units, we have several scenarios based on
> different parameters. And for each scenario, we provide 29 environmental
> impacts - Global Warming Potential, Ionising radiations, Abiotic resources
> depletion, Water Usage, etc. - based on international and european
> standards (ISO 14040/44, PEF, etc.).
>
> If it's of interest for the group, I would ask my partners if they allow
> me to provide some web environmental impact factors to this working group.
>
> Best,
> Fred
> +33 6 16 95 96 01
> GreenIT,.fr founder
> We provide data about the digital world's environmental impacts.
>
>
> Le lun. 22 août 2022 à 01:13, Ismael Velasco <ismaelv.dev@gmail.com> a
> écrit :
>
>> I thought this might be of interest to the community, in terms of the
>> need to choose metrics for measuring the carbon impact of the applications
>> we design.
>>
>> https://ismaelvelasco.dev/emissions-in-1gb
>>
>> I've written a blog that goes into the range of factors involved in
>> determining the CO2 emissions of data transmissions.  I've all of these
>> referenced in various articles, but haven't come across one that references
>> them all in the same place, with tools and strategies for choosing how to
>> evaluate and monitor emissions from data.
>>
>> TLDR: There is no straightforward metric available (possible?), and the
>> emissions of 1GB will vary by hardware, software, use case and grid
>> intensity. More particularly the emissions will vary by source, device,
>> model, signal type, transfer protocol, active software, use case and grid
>> energy source at a particular moment.
>>
>> I give a brief intro to each in my article, and recommend the focus be on
>> improvement over exactitude, emission reduction over precision tracking,
>> iterating over time to improve and refine metrics.
>>
>> This would be relevant when it comes to issuing guidelines, or
>> integrating emissions tracking into browsers, in dev tools or more
>> prominently. Likewise when it comes to green web certification projects.
>>
>> Appreciate any feedback!
>>
>