Clouds and Matter

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Versió en català

Some days ago I fantasized with my work mates about how the devices of the future would be. We'll all bring a kind of mobile phone that will work as a smartphone and laptop at the same time, including a projector so that any wall could be our screen, a projected virtual keyboard to tape over any flat surface, and just the essential power to communicate with the cloud. Of course, everything will be in the cloud.

Then, I could'nt help imaging how everyone reaches de cloud and I saw mobile phone base stations, kilometers of copper and fiber optic cables, thousands of communication devices, thousands of servers plenty of memory and connected to Petabytes of disk anywhere in the world. How much matter to let the Cloud rise!

I want to make a consideration here. I think we're not conscious of the dependence on minerals and chemical substances in the ICT world. We love talking and dreaming about augmented reality, the 2.0 paradigm, the Big Data, semantic search or the Cloud. But underneath there's always copper, iron, silicon and substances difficult to pronounce and remember. We already have some alerts about the availability of these matters.

The danger of scarcity is approaching. From time to time we can read news about copper robberies: from train lines, from utility infrastructures, from greenhouses, and even Telefonica copper cable stocks broke because of continuous robberies in their facilities. Its capacity to be recycled and the great demand by many kind of industries (ICT are big consumers) produces a lack of copper "in the market".

If there is a shortage these days, in a not so far future we will face a big dimensions problem: the exhaustion of copper mines. The Hubbert peak theory stands that the extraction of a resource will drop as quickly as it grew when half of the stocks are already extracted. It happened with oil in the US, which reached its peak in 1971, and is happening with oil considering the whole planet. We have probably already passed its peak and that's why it is so expensive now: demand continues to rise, but its production can't grow any more.

Minerals also follow Hubbert's peak theory. A estudy made by the University of Zaragoza has calculated the peaks of some quite common minerals: copper will reach it in 2024, aluminium in 2067 and iron in 2068. So in only 13 years we will see spectacular price rises. Even worse, following generations will have to look for another metal for the same functions after 8.000 years among men. We can always hope that a new material is found, but the feeling of the study is that we're exhausting a great part of the available minerals of the earth crust.

We can put into action several solutions for this problem. The 3 Rs are a great guide: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle materials. A first solution is taking more profit from the hardware we buy, lengthening its useful life. This way we generate less waste and less materials and energy are needed to produce a new equipment in the same period of time. Hardware assemblers and vendors won't be happy with this one, though.

We can also contract our "hardware" in the cloud, transferring our responsibility to the provider. In this case we must assure that our supplier will put into practice this responsibility as we would.

In the case of equipment manufacturers, another solution to consider is making a very good design of products to ease repair and component + material recycling. If we have to buy new equipment, we should choose those manufacturers that bet on good ecodesign. Yet if we contract our hardware in the cloud we must demand the provider using hardware easy to repair and recycle.

Companies are already trying to substitute non recyclable materials and we can buy devices made of biodegradable natural fibers, like Fujitsu's M440 mouse and keyboard. But there's still a long path to walk in this field.


The ICT world is facing a serous problem and we all must help resolving it. The current paradigm of quick hardware substitution is at its limits and we must change it for a resource optimization one. This will force hardware manufacturers changing their produce and marketing model. Perhaps the cloud will be the catalyst of this change. Perhaps we will stop buying hardware and it will only be possible to subscribe it. We'll see it shortly...