Under the guise of environmentally friendly paperless classrooms and commuteless classroom attendance lays a deep environmental crisis rooted in technology itself. Unbeknownst to many, technology comes with a significant carbon footprint. With the rapid digitalization as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, the carbon impact is accelerating at a significant rate with recent estimates of the internet’s carbon dioxide equivalent emissions coming in at 1.7 billion tonnes in the year 2020 alone (Jisc, 2022). Moreover, 53.6 million tonnes of e-waste were generated worldwide in 2019 (World Health Organization, 2021).
As we live through a so-called technological or digital revolution, each year that passes brings with it exceptional advances in technology and the way that we operate within society. The advancement is fast with innovation dictating a seamlessly never-ending cycle of production and consumption while sidestepping the reality of finite resources and inadequate digital recycling processes. The world of Ed Tech is very much a forward-looking field in which innovation and transformation are the focus, with less time spent on the present and learning from failures of the past (Selwyn, Panrazio, et al., 2019). Meanwhile, as we embrace each new technology, many of which are packaged in a new device or tool, our e-waste grows. Selwyn (2021) points out that recycling devices is often simply dumping them in some of the poorest regions in the world contributing to increased levels of pollution, contamination and toxic waste. This is concerning and a warning to us all.
Fast forward to 2030, a mere eight years from now where Sophia, a 9-year-old girl in Alberta, Canada, is enrolled in grade four at her local community school. Her school is digitally driven and prides itself on only using the latest and most advanced technology to enhance learning in order to provide the best education possible. In an effort to reduce travel-related carbon emissions, Sophia’s classroom has stopped taking a yearly field trip to the nearby mountains to study the local ecosystem and instead uses a virtual reality application to provide an immersive learning experience allowing them to simulate exploring an area that they would not be able to if they were there on foot (Adžgauskaitė et al., 2020). Sophia wonders what the trees smell like and imagines going there one day, in real life. However, she doesn’t realize that that same forested area would be destroyed in a fire the following year as hot and dry conditions have persisted over the last decade. Sophia is used to summers with smoke-filled skies due to the increasing prevalence of forest fires. It is all she has known. To her, it is normal and she doesn’t think about it all that often. She doesn’t visit or spend time in forests, at least not in real life, and doesn’t feel personally connected to them in any way. Always striving to keep up with the latest advances in educational technology, Sophia’s school invests a considerable amount of money into upgrading devices and software each year and ensures each student has access to their own personal computing devices, including a laptop and a tablet. The school prioritizes the recycling of devices upon upgrading and has them delivered to an electronic recycling management program in an effort to dispose of them responsibly.
As predicted by the World Health Organization (2021), the amount of e-waste has grown to 74.7 million tonnes, overwhelming landfills in low and middle-income countries. There are now 109 million jobs in waste management, up 70% from 2019, with many of these jobs managing e-waste. 9-year-old, Avi has been working informally in a landfill in Seelampur, India since he was 5. He collects parts from digital devices shipped from high-income countries to be dumped as e-waste. Avi is having a hard time breathing as of late and is often coughing and wheezing throughout the day and night. As a child, Avi has a faster breathing rate and smaller lungs compared to adults, making it easier to absorb and harder to metabolize the pollutants he breathes in each day (World Health Organization, 2021). Avi doesn’t attend school as he has to work full-time to contribute to his family’s income to buy food and meet their basic needs.
Back in Canada, on a shore near Bamfield on Vancouver Island, a killer whale lies lifeless. This is the second one to wash ashore in weeks. The Southern Resident Killer Whale, classified as endangered in Canada and the United States of America since 2003, has seen its population reduced from 73 to 64 since 2021 (Government of Canada, 2021). These killer whales are some of the most contaminated marine animals in the world (Garrett & Ross, 2010) and the impact of toxins entering the oceans from e-waste landfills through seepage and acid rain, affecting their food source, has continued to grow in recent years (Belmont Trading, 2017). Without significant intervention, these killer whales, along with many other species of marine life will face extinction.
Returning to the present time, it is important to note that these speculative stories are not based solely on the result of e-waste, but rather as part of a complex system contributing harm to life on earth and thus illustrating the need for systems thinking approach when considering the future. This story also illustrates the interconnectedness of the world with the impact of e-waste returning to Canada through the ocean ecosystem. In an interview discussing decolonizing design, design anthropologist Dori Tunstall (2019) shares the concept of designing ourselves back into the environment in a way that human-centred design is decentralized and humans become part of the larger ecosystem in a relational model. We need to be accountable to the earth – to the trees, the water, the soil, the air – and consider the most vulnerable as we design, produce and consume technology with a do no harm approach. This includes sourcing more sustainable, renewable materials to create and sustain electronic and technological devices, improving the longevity of device use, corporate responsibility for product end-life, and effective recycling practices (Selwyn, 2021). Specifically, within the field of educational technology, consideration needs to be given to educational provision and practice with ecological responsibility prioritized (Selwyn, Hillman, et al., 2019). Furthermore, a shift in beliefs and attitudes is warranted to slow down innovation and live, work, and learn within planetary limits, finding contention within an adequate teaching and learning framework. Understanding and considering ‘all our relations’ in the decision-making and planning process is an ethical approach we must take across all sectors, not just educational technology, for a healthy and sustainable future for all.
References
Adžgauskaitė, M., Abhari, K., & Pesavento, M. (2020). How virtual reality is changing the future of learning in K-12 and beyond using needs-affordances-features perspective. In HCI International Late Breaking Papers: Cognition, Learning and Games: Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp.279-298). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60128-7_22
Belmont Trading. (2017, January 30). Examining the impact of ewaste on marine life. https://www.belmont-trading.com/2017/01/examining-the-impact-of-ewaste-on-marine-life/
Garret, C. & Ross, P. (2010). Recovering resident killer whales: a guide to contaminant sources, mitigation, and regulations in British Columbia. https://www.arlis.org/docs/vol1/D/690987332.pdf
Government of Canada. (2021). Killer whale (orcinus orca), northeast pacific southern resident population. https://species-registry.canada.ca/index-en.html#/species/699-5
Jisc. (2020). Exploring digital carbon footprints. https://repository.jisc.ac.uk/8782/1/exploring-digital-carbon-footprints-report.pdf
Selwyn, N., Hillman, T., Eynon, R., Ferreira, G., Knox, J., Macgilchrist, F., & Sancho-Gil, J. M. (2019). What’s next for ed-tech? critical hopes and concerns for the 2020s. Learning, Media & Technology, 45(1), 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1694945
Selwyn, N., Pangrazio, L., Nemorin, S., & Perrotta, C. (2019). What might the school of 2030 be like? an exercise in social science fiction. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(1), 90–106. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1694944
Selwyn, N. (2021). Ed-tech within limits: anticipating educational technology in times of environmental crisis. E-Learning and Digital Media, 18(5), 496–510. https://doi.org/10.1177/20427530211022951
Tunstall, D. (2019, January 31). Respecting our relations: Dori Tunstall on decolonizing design [Interview transcript]. The Jacobs Institute. https://jacobsdesigncal.medium.com/respecting-our-relations-dori-tunstall-on-decolonizing-design-d894df4c2ed2
World Health Organization. (2021). Children and digital dumpsites: e-waste exposure and child health. https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/341718/9789240023901-eng.pdf