World Wide Waste with Gerry McGovern

Ben's career spans IT to telecoms and the evolving media landscape. With a foundation in IT at Logica for a decade, he transitioned to being the CTO of a pioneering music start-up at the peak of the internet revolution. His journey continued at Orange for almost another decade, where he played a pivotal role in the convergence of telecoms with the internet and spearheaded numerous media-focused initiatives. Follow Ben on LinkedIn

Web design has rarely taken the environment into account. Over the last decade, web pages have become ten times bigger, and up to 80% of the weight of a particular webpage can be waste—content and code that is not required for the page to function. Do web designers and developers simply not care? Vitaly Friedman believes that they do care but that they need better education about accessibility, usability and sustainability. Vitaly Friedman is one of the nicest and most brilliant people I know. Born in Minsk, Belarus, he studied computer science and mathematics in Germany, and co-founded Smashing Magazine back in 2006, a leading online magazine for designers and developers. His curiosity drove him from interface design to front-end to performance optimization to accessibility and back to user experience over all the years.

Manuel Vexler is the Executive Director at the Actionable Knowledge Foundational Institute (AKFI) and a Cornell Instructor and facilitator. He has a wealth of experience in leading and facilitating discussions on sustainability and digital transformation. Manuel believes that 5G doesn’t have a clear benefit and is rather a reflection of our growth-obsessed economies.www.akfi.org

Steven Gonzalez Monserrate is a postdoctoral researcher in the Fixing Futures research training group at Goethe University. As a graduate of MIT's History, Anthropology, Science, Technology & Society program, his dissertation project, "Cloud Ecologies", is an ethnography of data centers and their environmental impacts in the United States, Puerto Rico, Iceland, and Singapore. There is a global freshwater crisis and this crisis is being accelerated by data centers’ incredible thirst for water. Steven talks to Gerry about the environmental impact data centers are having on fresh water supply, particularly in water-stressed areas, and how it is likely to get worse because AI is particularly water intense Some selected quotes from Steven: Some scholars are estimating that anything from 5% to 10% of data center water comes from alternative water sources, like grey water, sea water. But the vast majority is drinking water. And there are a few reasons for this. One is the biohazard. As water is being warmed and flowing through these data centers, microorganisms flourish in these conditions. That is one reason why data centers turn to drinking water because that water has already to some degree been treated, so there is less of s risk of these microbial blooms happening. For the same microbial reason, the water can’t be endlessly recycled. It has to be dumped or returned to the sewers because even with reverse-osmosis filters and other techniques, these microbes will flourish. Some water, when it evaporates can leave behind really corrosive particulates of various kinds.  The data centers will come if you offer them the right incentives around land, water and electricity, even is these incentives are fundamentally unsustainable, if they’re irresponsible, if they’re suicidal or self-destructive. If you have access to cheap fresh water, deserts are a great place for data centers because they are so dry—and computers hate moisture and high humidity. That’s why there are so many data centers in Arizona “It’s almost like the goldrush. It’s a water-rush. All these companies are clustering to get this cheap water. But it’s doomed.” As the suicidal spiral by data centers and industrial farming circles the drains in even more frenzied swirls, “We see how communities are struggling to pay their water bills while data centers and other industries are getting water at a much cheaper rate. There are farmers who are directly competing with data centers to grow food. Indigenous communities are also having difficulties accessing water. The draining of the Colorado river is affecting the migration patterns of salmon and other fish, which are really important to the lifecycles. These data centers will not last. I think that’s another important point for people to realize. These data centers are ephemeral. They know that they will eventually have to disband. This is the kind of perversity of data centers coming into many communities with these promises of economic growth. There is certainly a lot of jobs that are created to construct the data center. But once a data center has actually been constructed, it’s only a handful of people who actually run a facility. So, in some cases, just a dozen people, or two dozen people, run a facility that is consuming as much electricity as a small city. A data center life is between five and twenty years. This is not a permanent industry. It is extractive, like mines. World Wide Waste (Gerry's latest book)

Geotechnical specialist Pietro Jarre discusses the impact of digital technologies on the environment. Topics include mining disasters, closure of mines, societal impacts of mining, challenges of sustainable mining, environmental effects of bauxite mining, and the importance of reducing material consumption and energy usage.

Perk Pomeyie is a Ghanaian environmental activist from Accra, who is currently the National Coordinator of the Ghana Youth Environmental Movement-a leading youth-led environment and climate advocacy and campaign group in Ghana. I started by asking Perk to tell me more about how the youth movement works.https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/Other useful links Become a Patron of This is HCD / Become a Patron Sign up to This is HCD Newsletter / Stay up to date with This is HCD Learn more with This is HCD / Courses on Service Design, Human Centered Design, UX Design, Research Coaching for Change-Makers / Coaching & Mentoring for Innovators & Change-Makers FREE GUIDE - 10 UX Laws of UX: FREE GUIDE - 10 Laws of User Experience (UX) FREE GUIDE - 7 Days of Awesome Journey Map Tips: FREE 7-DAY GUIDE - Killer Journey Mapping Tips Follow Gerry Scullion on Twitter / gerrycircus Follow This is HCD on Twitter / thisishcd Our partner links We recommend Webflow for all web design and development needs.‍ Webflow: Create a custom website | No-code website builder We used Descript to power our podcast  ‍Descript | All-in-one video & podcast editing, easy as a doc Our podcast is edited by the A-Team at CastUp / Enquire with them about editing.  ‍Learn more and connect with Castup

People like Kaustubh Thapa give me hope. Kaustubh is finishing his PhD at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His collaborative research in Nigeria, China and Vietnam incorporates justice, equity, and sustainability for a fairer EU waste trade and a just circular economy transition. I started off by asking Kaustubh if he could give me a bit of history in relation to the European dumping of e-waste in Nigeria and other African countrieshttps://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/Other useful links Become a Patron of This is HCD / Become a Patron Sign up to This is HCD Newsletter / Stay up to date with This is HCD Learn more with This is HCD / Courses on Service Design, Human Centered Design, UX Design, Research Coaching for Change-Makers / Coaching & Mentoring for Innovators & Change-Makers FREE GUIDE - 10 UX Laws of UX: FREE GUIDE - 10 Laws of User Experience (UX) FREE GUIDE - 7 Days of Awesome Journey Map Tips: FREE 7-DAY GUIDE - Killer Journey Mapping Tips Follow Gerry Scullion on Twitter / gerrycircus Follow This is HCD on Twitter / thisishcd

Dr Melvin Vopson is a truly fascinating character and deep thinker. A physicist, he is the proposer of the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, has identified a technological singularity called the Information Catastrophe and has discovered the second law of information dynamics. Melvin is the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of the world's first Information Physics Institute. His current scientific interests revolve around theoretical and experimental studies involving all aspects of information physics. I started by asking Melvin about his theory that information has its own weight, a weight independent of the device it is stored on.

John Booth is a well-known figure in EU data centre circles, primarily for his role as reviewer for the EU Code of Conduct for Data Centres and his work with the Certified Energy Efficiency Data Centre Award. I started by asking John if he thinks data centers are doing enough to conserve energy, water and materials in this time of crisis. I gave an example of a 2021 survey which found that 63% of data center managers thought “there is no business justification for collecting water usage data.”Yes, thought there are laws coming from the EU that should change that attitude.

Aluminum mining: jobs and death in rural IrelandAluminum is a critical material for digital. Since 1970, there has been 559% increase in its mining. A typical smartphone can be 14% aluminum, while a up to 50% of a laptop can be made up of steel and aluminum. Pat and Nuala Geoghegan are farmers from Askeaton, County Limerick. Soon after the Aughinish Alumina aluminum mining factory established itself nearby, their cattle began to get sick and die. And the Geoghegan family got sick. Their beautiful farm became “the killing fields”.