Information waste, the environment and human action: Concepts and research

Abstract

Information technology is powered by electricity. Although its impact on Green House Gasses (GHG) is still rather limited, the next decade will show an explosion of its impact because technological innovations on data communication, information retrieval and datacenter operation will not compensate the increased need for energy of information technology. This paper approaches the problem not from a technical perspective, but from the perspective of information value and the opportunities to detect and remove information waste. For this we identify several indicators of information waste and we then propose some key ideas for researching the topic. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.