30-Day Roadmap - Challenge #16

HeyupConecta

Sustainability dilemma 🌍🔋

—

🔸 What current gadget do you think produces the most waste or is the least sustainable for our planet? ♻️

And if you could, what small change would you suggest to make it greener and more eco-friendly? 🌱

💠 Let’s talk about innovation with responsibility how can tech companies do better for the environment? 🌏💡

📌 Use #GreenTechTalk 🏷️

—

Because progress means nothing if the planet can’t keep up 🌿

Menguelez

HeyupConecta

#GreenTechTalk

I believe that printers and their printing cartridges

dsmonteiro

HeyupConecta

It’s not a physical gadget, but if we want to have a real #GreenTechTalk, the biggest responsible for waste is AI. AI, by itself, consumes 2% of the total world power, and billions of gallons of water every year. (Source) To put things into perspective, 2% of the world’s power is 460 TWh. That’s an abstract number, so let me give you a better example. The power used by AI in a single year, would be enough to run 1 million homes for 131 years. That’s one millions houses for over a lifetime.

To make matters worse, while the power usage of traditional data centers is increasing about 2% a year, the AI data centers’ power needs are growing at about 30% a year. That means that in less than 5 years, that power consumption will more than double.

nikkierodrigues

HeyupConecta One gadget I think contributes a lot of waste is smartphones. Every year, new models come out, and many people upgrade before their current phone is truly at the end of its life. This produces a huge amount of electronic waste, and the mining of rare materials for components adds further strain on the environment.

A small change that could make a big difference is modular or repairable designs. If smartphones were easier to repair, upgrade, or recycle, like swapping out the battery, camera, or storage and people wouldn’t need to replace the whole device so often. Additionally, companies could offer longer software support to extend device lifespan.

Innovation doesn’t have to come at the planet’s expense. Small design and policy changes like these could make tech a lot greener while still pushing the boundaries of performance.

#GreenTechTalk

nikkierodrigues

dsmonteiro Wow, those numbers really put things into perspective, AI’s energy use is definitely something we need to talk about!

Just to add a bit of nuance, the current research suggests that all data centres together use around 1–1.5% of global electricity, and AI workloads are a rapidly growing share of that. So the “AI alone consumes 2% of world power” is probably an overestimate, but the point is still very valid: AI is a major driver of energy demand, and that demand is increasing quickly.

I also found the water usage for cooling data centers interesting, it’s definitely a real concern, even if the exact figures are hard to pin down.

I do love your point about looking at the environmental impact behind the scenes, not just the devices we hold. It makes me wonder; what small steps could AI companies take right now to make training and inference greener? Maybe better model optimization, renewable-powered data centres, or smarter cooling systems.

Thanks for sharing, it really makes me think about how tech progress and sustainability have to go hand in hand!