It's time we started to understand how technology drives the sustainable agenda

An article in Wired, “How the iPhone helped save the planet”, covers a topic that has interested me for a long time: the counter-intuitive idea that rather than leading to hyper-consumerism, technological development creates a net saving for society in terms of the resources used in the manufacture of new, replacement products.

I’ve been using the graphs produced by Statist for several years, as seen in the illustration (or this one) that visualize the replacement process we’ve all have been noticing for time. Before, we bought digital cameras, GPS devices and MP3 players, but all those functions — and many more — now come as standard in our smartphones or as apps. There are still consumer segments that continue to demand dedicated devices, but that demand has not only fallen hugely; some categories have been replaced entirely.

If we were to cast our eyes back, as Steve Cichon has, over some of the classic consumer electronics advertisements of the 1990s in newspapers and magazines, we see the magnitude of this substitution process: 13 of the 15 devices being advertised have been replaced today by the smartphone, which costs less than $1,000, has replaced a whole bunch of items adding up to several thousand dollars (Cichon estimates around $3,000, which updated for inflation is closer to $5,000), along with several kilos of plastics, glass, metals and electronic components. It’s the same story with microelectronics: many functions that previously required transistors or components of various types have now been absorbed by microprocessors or much lighter components that consume less energy. Electricity consumption provides us with another counterintuitive variable: even though we now depend much more on electrical appliances, consumption in the United States has remained essentially flat for more than a decade, reflecting increasingly greater efficiency.

Obviously, not all the data can be universally extrapolated: countries where, for example, the adoption of air conditioners has skyrocketed. But once a certain balance has been reached, technology seems to be generating greater efficiency, substitution, and in many ways, stability.

Technology will be just one piece of the puzzle that could lead us to a more sustainable future and probably won’t even be the most important. The real change to come will manifest itself through our habits and our approaches and attitudes, not just in terms of consumption, but many other factors. Until now we haven’t given much thought to technology as a force that, through substitution processes, will play a role in developing a more sustainable economy, but it’s certainly time we did.

(En espa?ol, aquí)