Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
sector, while still enabling consumers to promote sustainability through their ability
to consume more ethically. Some retailers and multinationals have attempted to
enhance their own corporate brand value through 'clean-washing' - in other words,
misleading consumers by using fair trade as a simple public relations tool to upgrade
a company's reputation to that of a responsible and socially concerned organization
(Pierre, 2007). Many criticisms of Nestlé's launch of its own fair-trade coffee, Partners'
Blend, ran along these lines. Additionally, with the increase in demand, the future
of small-scale producers may become precarious, as supermarkets will demand both
volume and perhaps quality, and aesthetic standards and accreditation far beyond
the purse of small growers and producers. This may lead fair-trade producers to
pursue competition rather than co-operation strategies in order to secure and maintain
contracts with the major retailers, thus jeopardizing the fair-trade movement's capacity
to mediate and reshape local global relations and socio-ecological concerns in the
interests of trade, social and environmental justice.
Case study: digital media companies, carbon footprints and
corporate responsibility
With the number of mobile and other digital devices rapidly expanding and the ever-
increasing amount of data being being transmitted via the Internet, there is clearly
a downside to the ubiquitous nature of new media technology. This not only relates
to a degree of government surveillance, corporate colonization of the cyber commons
and destructive hacking, but also the burgeoning ecological footprint and the
discernible trend towards the sheer size of the global digital infrastructure being too
large for appropriate human monitoring and control. A report by the International
Telecommunications Union, an agency based in Geneva, has suggested that by 2014
there will probably be 7.3 billion devices in the world compared with a global
population of around 7 billion (ITU, 2012). Russia and Brazil have more cell-phone
accounts than people, and China already accounts for around 25 per cent of the
world's cell-phone users. It is, then, no wonder that the earnings from digital
communication services and technologies has been estimated at about $1.5 trillion
in 2010 - i.e. 2.4 per cent of global GDP (ITU, 2012). The ecological footprint of
this digital technology, including its voracious consumption of rare earth metals that
go into the device's manufacture, and the energy used to run the devices and increasing
numbers of huge data services, is already equivalent to that of global aviation - i.e.
about 2 per cent of global carbon emissions (Maxwell and Miller, 2012). In 2013,
a series of system crashes affected Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, and on
one quiet Thursday in August the Nasdaq stock market shut down for three hours,
caused by a communication failure between its platform for processing quotes and
trades and that of allegedly the New York Stock Exchange. This resulted in about
one-third fewer shares being traded that day than expected. These outages are likely
to continue in the future (Garside, 2013). According to Cisco, the major digital
media manufacturing company, the amount of data being transmitted in 2017 will
be calculated in terms of zettabytes - about one trillion gigabytes (Cisco, 2013).
Overall, IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 23 per cent from
2012 to 2017, with traffic from wireless and mobile devices exceeding that from
wired devices by 2016 and the monthly Internet traffic in North America generating
around 7 billion DVDs' worth of data every month. There will inevitably be more
