By Anthony Biondi (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: February 29, 2012
Look around you. Is there someone on their cell phone? It’s likely there is. But it gets better. According to the Cisco Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast the likelihood of you seeing someone on their cellphone is about to rise. They predicted that by the end of 2012 there will be more active cell phones on this planet than people.
It’s a staggering thought. How can there be more cell phones than people? Especially considering factors like children (who don’t or shouldn’t have cell phones), availability in certain countries being close to nil, and poverty. This means that some people somewhere have two or three active cell phones to themselves. The puzzling thing: what are these phones for? Who knows. Who. Knows.
And what does that mean for this planet? We all know the global network has been growing exponentially since the invention of the telephone and the Internet. We all know that our community isn’t limited to the physical, and can stretch to Russia or China. To put it simply, the possibilities with communication seem endless. According to the same survey, the amount of global monthly mobile data transfers has also been growing rapidly. So, wherever you are (within cellphone range) there are hundreds of megabytes zipping through the air in every direction, and it’s always growing.
In this fast-paced, closely-knit society, we put a lot of reliance on these tools; the load they bear increases with that reliance. We are already trying to alleviate our reliance on vehicles with campaigns to increase public transit and go-green initiatives. However, while cars have a bad rep due to the obviousness of their pollution, what is the environmental impact of the cellphone? They still require manufacturing; they still require rechargeable batteries.
Leena Oiva, who wrote Case Study on the Environmental Impacts of a Mobile Phone, stated that most cell phones eventually end up in our landfills. As with most things that end up in landfills, they continually pollute the surrounding environment by leaking deadly toxins and chemicals. She also hints towards the impacts of this in terms of marketing. If there is a new model every year, how many of the older phones are then forgotten or trashed? It can be staggering to think about.
Alongside vehicles and other electronics, cell phones are just a piece of the puzzle. Yet as their numbers grow so do our problems with the way they’re handled. The environmental awareness blog sayiamgreen.com also raises the point that by simply charging our phones we are increasing our power consumption, and therefore raising the amount of fossil fuels and greenhouse gasses burned as a result of supplying that power. If we consider that the number of cell phones on this planet are about to surpass the global population, the amount of pollution and waste that comes as a result is only going to increase as well.
However, there is another side to this argument. Watching technological growth in recent years, electronics have been becoming more efficient and more universal. We have phones that serve as iPods, and tablet computers that replace laptops and have lower energy consumption rates. TVs and home electronics have became increasingly more energy efficient as well. It may not be much, but if certain functions continue to amalgamate into single devices, then our reliance on other devices—such as iPods and the like—will lessen and be replaced with a single mobile device.
We live in a society where we always have to consider our global impact. Given the predictions and facts, it seems that impact continues to rise. But there are ways to avoid this, such as recycling and re-using.
However, as the technology grows, its own usefulness (as well as the producers and consumers) may also step up to provide a solution. All we can hope is that things don’t get any more out of hand, and that we don’t do something we can’t reverse.
