The devices that give us access to the virtual world are very real: they cost money, consume energy, track and commodify every step of our lives, are assembled in huge factories and run on increasingly rare minerals. Not everyone involved in the production of computers and phones stands to gain. Every so often, reports or reports appear about exploitation of workers, about unhealthy working conditions, about how the mineral trade perpetuates civil wars or other forms of oppression in certain regions.

Electronics companies also seem to make a sport of making their appliances break down faster than they actually need to. This is then called ‘planned obsolescence’.

Planned obsolescence is an umbrella term for deliberate strategies and techniques that cause products to have a shorter lifespan, as a function of sales. Those techniques cause your device -often just outside the warranty period- to stop working, or start working less well.

For example, your smartphone that stops performing security updates, making your device suddenly susceptible to viruses, or your device that starts working slower after a certain period of time via a built-in setting. Not offering replacement parts, or offering them very expensively, also falls under this concept.

This leads to e.g. the average smartphone being used for less than 2 years (note the warranty period).

The ICT sector has very many challenges. If you look at the supply chain, you see 4 stages:

1. Mining of raw materials
2. Assembly (production phase)
3. Consumption
4. E-Waste

Most people already heard the stories of the factories in Asia where workers have to work 70 to 80 hours while often receiving very low wages ($1 to $2 a day, according to reports from 2019). The labour and human rights violations are immense.

What is less well known are the environmental and social problems that occur when extracting the raw materials. For example, water and food pollution lead to diseases among local peoples near the mines where these raw materials come from. Mining and metallurgy today is said to account for 20% of all health impacts owv air pollution and more than a quarter of global CO2 emissions.

And the impact of their use should not be underestimated either. For example, 8-10% of European electricity consumption and 4% of CO2 emissions can be attributed to the use of ICT.

Unfortunately, we are also one of the largest producers of E-Waste in Europe. Every year, some 40 million tonnes (!) of e-waste are deposited in landfills, incinerated, illegally traded or treated without following common standards.

Keeping appliances in use for longer and having them properly disposed of mitigates this social and environmental impact.

On 7 June, the City and OCMW Ghent signed Catapa's ‘Ctrl-Alt-Del’ charter. With the signing of the Ctrl-Alt-Del Charter, Ghent is helping to promote fairer trade in the ICT sector: using computers for longer, repairing laptops and buying more sustainable models, i.e. no more laptops and smartphones designed to quickly become obsolete.

Concrete ambitions

The City already took earlier steps towards more sustainable ICT, through repair and sharing initiatives, with sustainability criteria in public procurement and through membership of Electronics Watch, an international organisation working for better working conditions in the electronics manufacturing process. In 2021, District 09, the City's ICT partner, therefore received the Fair ICT Award.

Meanwhile, the City is permanently committed to a more circular and sustainable ICT policy, in the form of concrete ambitions:

Impose criteria on suppliers to reduce the environmental impact of the production phase.

Striking the right balance between increasing energy efficiency and lifetime extension.

Reduce travel and thus CO2 emissions by solving problems remotely.

Establish an improvement path for automatic server shutdown to save energy.