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 in...

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, us...

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 globa...

Pietro Jarre has a doctorate in geotechnical engineering. He’s a specialist in geotechnical and environmental issues on waste rock deposits, mining infrastructures, landfills and brownfields. Since 2015, his focus is on the environmental and social impact of digital technologies. He’s founder of Sloweb association, something I’d highly recommend checking out at  slowweb.org . Pietro starts our cha...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Aluminum mining: jobs and death in rural Ireland Aluminum 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 it...

Thea Kleinmagd is a Circular Material Chains Innovator at Fairphone. When you are buying your next smartphone, please consider Fairphone. They make excellent, modular and repairable products that are built to last. I started our chat by asking Thea to describe the potential toxic impacts of some of the over 50 different materials found in a typical smartphone. https://www.linkedin.com/in/thea-klei...

Dr. Josh Lepawsky is fascinated by connections between geography, technological systems, and their discards. He researches waste from the manufacturing of electronics to its end of life. He explores where e-waste accumulates and who it affects. He has a keen interest in “how maintenance and repair might offer lessons for figuring out how to live well together in permanently polluted and always bre...

Gauthier Roussilhe has specialized in the environmental footprint of the digital sector for 5 years, and is certainly among the most knowledable people I have been lucky to chat with about these issues. He is currently doing a PhD at the RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) to explore which digital infrastructures and services are compatible with a world stabilized at +2°C. I started our...

Andy Farnell is a British computer scientist and author specialising in signals, systems and cybersecurity. His popular textbook "Designing Sound" (MIT) and pioneering research and development in audio DSP and synthesis defined the field of Procedural Audio. Consultant to leading technology companies, and visiting professor across Europe, Andy is a long-time advocate and prominent speaker on issue...

Hannah is a freelance WordPress developer from Bristol with a background in Computer Science. Before freelance life, amongst other things, she honed her management skills at the Environment Agency, where she managed large business change projects. She’s co-founder of Green Tech South West and is on a mission to raise awareness about the environmental impact of digital tech - checkout #LetsGreenThe...

'Earth Experience Design' course with Gerry McGovern Date: February 19 2022 Where: Online Tickets: https://www.thisisdoing.com/courses/earth-experience-design-january-2022  About this episode Is technology a good thing? That was my first question I asked Dr Sharon Richardson, who is a senior scientist and lecturer in geocomputation at the University of Zurich, where she applies data-intensive meth...

Earth Experience Design - Online training Course with Gerry - Jan 19 2022  https://www.thisisdoing.com/courses/earth-experience-design-january-2022 About this episode Some people live their ideas. Katie Singer is one of them. She writes about the energy, extraction, toxic waste and greenhouse gases involved in manufacturing computers, telecom infrastructure, electric vehicles and other electronic...

If someone looked inside your computer or your Cloud account would they find a tidy, clean, well-maintained place? Or would they find a messy, chaotic dump. Imagine if old, waste content smelled. How smelly would your computer be?   Anneli Ohvril is founder and CEO of Let’s Do It World, the international environmental organisation that engages leaders and organisations around the globe for a waste...

Hear about the many digital sustainability initiatives that are happening in France from Virginie Guerin, an urban planner, who is co-founder of World CleanUp Day France. Learn about the recipe they used to get organizations and citizens involved in highly successful digital cleanup initiatives.  Virginie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/virginie-guerin-consultante-transition-ecologique-vi...

Join Gerry McGovern at the Doing Design Festival on June 18 / See  http://www.doingdesignfestival.com The Website Carbon Calculator is a real go to tool for me when I want to find out how much CO2 a particular web page is creating. This, and many other great initiatives, comes from Wholegrain Digital, a company founded by Vineeta and Tom Greenwood in 2007. Tom has recently published an excellent b...

When COVID-19 hit, many governments reverted to a panic publishing approach, getting as much content up on their websites as quickly as possible. Structure, organization, testing, it all got shoved aside in the rush to publish. Sarah explains how this sort of panic publishing culture can be avoided in the future because panicking serves nobody. Sarah Richards defined the term ‘content design’ in t...

When Liam Nugent closed down his digital agency he accounted for all the digital stuff they had created. Each employee was generating about 100 gigabytes of data a year. When they cleaned up all this data so as to give a quality hand-off to their clients, they found that 99.9% of the 8 terabytes of data they had created was useless. Buy the book by Gerry McGovern - https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/...

Netlife is one of Norway’s digital pioneers, having focused on usability and user experience when it was not exactly fashionable. Beth Stensen, their CEO, talks to Gerry McGovern about how Netlife is on a new journey which focuses on the Earth Experience. It’s exciting and challenging times. Digital can often accelerate very bad and wasteful human behaviours. Designing digital for Earth Experience...

By 2035, it is estimated that there will be more than 2,000 zettabytes of data produced globally. Based on current storage pricing, 2,000 zettabytes would cost $58 trillion to store. The global economy is currently worth about $80 trillion. The pace and quantity of data production is not even remotely sustainable. One zettabyte—just one zettabyte—would require 20 trillion trees worth of paper to p...

The growth in webpage size over the years has been astounding. It is driven by a culture of delivery, a project mindset, and a feeling that the Web is this unlimited space where you can essentially do anything you want without consequences. But good web design is a complex task that many organizations are either unwilling or unable to manage professionally. Once the initial buzz of signing off the...