Technological advances for increased human convenience with an eye on future sustainability of our planet is fine; but it is actually forcing us to consume more materials than what the planet can produce. And that is a big concern.
-------------------------------
The
growing human appetite for higher and more compact technology in the hope of a
better future for our planet has ironically put us on a track towards doom.
The
pursuit of developing more sophistication for human convenience, while hoping
it reduces material consumption, has on the contrary resulted in more materialization
– which means we are only using more material to make more volumes of
sophisticated technology. But we did not foresee that it would only result in
higher demand, thus increasing material consumption.
This
has brought us to a point where we are actually exploiting and consuming more
resources from our planet than what it can produce naturally.
JEVONS’ PARADOX
The 19th
century English economist William Stanley Jevons, in 1865, had observed that
while improvements were made in coal-fired steam engines to reduce the price of
coal, the actual result was that coal consumption actually increased.
While experts of his time opined that
technological improvements would lead to reduction in coal consumption, Jevons’
– based on his observation – was convinced that coal-fired power’s efficiency
that saw a reduction in coal prices only resulted in an increase in consumer
demand for electricity. And this resulted in further depletion of coal
reserves.
This came to be known as Jevons’
Paradox.
NO REDUCTION IN MATERIALS USED
Now, an
MIT-led research has examined whether the world’s use of materials has been
swayed by Jevons’ Paradox.
The researchers found that
technological advance by itself will not be able to bring about
dematerialization and, ultimately, a sustainable world. They have elaborated
that no matter how much more efficient and compact a product is made consumers
will only demand more of that product. In the longer run, it increases the
total amount of materials used in making that product.
Christopher
Magee, a professor of the practice of engineering systems in MIT’s Institute
for Data, Systems, and Society, and his co-author, Tessaleno Devezas, a
professor at the University of Beira Interior, in Portugal, have pointed to the
world’s fastest-improving technologies, the silicon-based semiconductors, as
one of the latest examples of this.
Over
the last few decades, technological improvements in the efficiency of
semiconductors have greatly reduced the amount of material needed to make a
single transistor. As a result, today’s smartphones, tablets, and computers are
far more powerful and compact than computers built in the 1970s.
However, they found that that
consumers’ demand for silicon outpaced the rate of its technological change,
and the world’s consumption of silicon has grown by 345% over the last four
decades. And by 2005, there were more transistors used than printed text
characters.
“Despite how fast technology is
racing, there’s actually more silicon used today, because we now just put more
stuff on, like movies, and photos, and things we couldn’t even think of 20
years ago,” says Magee. “So we’re still using a little more material all the
time.”
An MIT release on the research says
that the team developed a model to calculate whether dematerialization is
taking place for a given product. The model considers a number of variables,
including population and economic growth, a product’s yearly increase in
technological performance, and demand elasticity — the degree to which demand
for a product varies with its price.
“Not surprisingly, the researchers’
model indicates that dematerialization is more likely when demand elasticity
for a product is relatively low and the rate of its technological improvement
is high,” says the MIT release. “But when they applied the equation to common
goods and services used today, they found that demand elasticity and
technological change worked against each other — the better a product was made
to perform, the more consumers wanted it.”
A similar trend was discovered in 56
other materials, goods and services, ranging from basic resources such as
aluminum and formaldehyde to hardware and energy technologies such as hard disk
drives, transistors, wind energy, and photovoltaics.
They found no evidence of
dematerialization – or an overall reduction in their use – despite
technological improvements to their performance.
“There is a techno-optimist’s position
that says technological change will fix the environment,” Magee observes. “This
says, probably not!...It seems we haven’t seen saturation in demand. People
haven’t said, ‘That’s enough,’ at least in anything that we can get data to
test for.”
Their
study findings were published recently in the journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change.
Magee and Devezas gathered data for 57
common goods and services, including widely used chemical components such as
ammonia, formaldehyde, polyester fiber, and styrene, along with hardware and
energy technologies such as transistors, laser diodes, crude oil,
photovoltaics, and wind energy. They worked the data for each product into
their equation, and, despite seeing technological improvements in almost all
cases, they failed to find a single case in which dematerialization — an
overall reduction in materials — was taking place.
REDUCTIONS HAPPENED HERE, BUT…
In follow-up work, the researchers
were eventually able to identify only six cases in which an absolute decline in
materials usage has occurred.
However, these cases mostly include
toxic chemicals such as asbestos and thallium, whose dematerialization was due
not to technological advances, but to government intervention.
There was one other case in which
researchers observed dematerialization: wool. The material’s usage has
significantly fallen, due to innovations in synthetic alternatives, such as
nylon and polyester fabrics. In this case, Magee argues that substitution, and
not dematerialization, has occurred. In other words, wool has simply been
replaced by another material to fill the same function.
TRACE OF HOPE
However, others are more hopeful that
technology will bring about sustainability, albeit at significant cost.
“[Technology] will
get us to a sustainable world – it has to,” says J Doyne Farmer, a professor of
mathematics at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the research,
but who was quoted in the MIT release. “I say this not only because we need it,
but because there is only so much we can suck out of the Earth, and eventually
we will be forced into a sustainable world, one way or another. The question is
whether we can do that without great pain.
Magee’s paper shows that we need to expect more pain than some of us
thought.”