Electronic media infrastructures and gear are important components of global ICT as movies, television, music, and books all go digital. This post offers a global sampling of sustainability in e-media. We just added albert - a UK entertainment industry initiative.

After you have finished with this post, see more by clicking on the "Green media" tag, above.

Government entities have an important role to play in encouraging sustainable ICT across all industries. Effective leadership requires internal implementation, as well. The tag at the top of this post - 'government' - helps you easily locate posts containing opportunities for and applications of Green ICT in government operations. (Green ICT in public education is found through the 'education' tag.) We note briefer items in this post, but haven't updated it recently. An email from TCO Certified reminded us that municipalities continue to pursue Green ICT purchasing.

A MarketsandMarkets report says, "The global volume of e-waste generated is expected to reach 93.5 million tons in 2016 from 41.5 million tons in 2011 at a CAGR of 17.6% from 2011 to 2016." Three strategies for dealing with an organization's aging ICT gear are scrap, external reuse, and internal reuse. Internal reuse offers a growing number of increasingly sophisticated options while external reuse is revealing some unintended consequences. Reuse options are growing for home devices, as well.

"Were America's Millions of Analog TVs Recycled?" That's the question we began asking eight years ago as the United States converted from analog to digital television (DTV), obsoleting the traditional CRT-based sets. The answer now appears to be "no" due to consumer behavior and a declining market for CRT by-products. The image at the right, taken at a collection point for a university student housing change-over in August 2016, illustrates that there are still a lot of analog CRTs out there.

Short updates from Asia-Pacific. Click here for regional Green ICT updates from around the globe. Click on 'Asia-Pac' tag above for all news about the region. Our latest item looks at the scope of GreenICT.

The 2016 Seed Awards in India are promoting a "Green ICT" theme, but the description is a little off. "Does your eco-inclusive enterprise demonstrate social & environmental impacts through application of information and communications technology? Or does it provide solutions for sustainable consumption or production using information and communications technology?" This appears to be an example of confusing GreenICT with ICT4Green, nevertheless, we would encourage any enterprise with a true Green ICT focus to consider entering. This can help align ICT4D with Green ICT.

Click on the "recycle" tag, above, and you will find all sorts of information about ICT's contribution to the global e-waste stream. Exactly how large is this contribution? It appears ICT gear only contributes about a quarter of the e-waste stream.

This is solar-powered base station on top of a mountain in Lapland (Finland).

Remote ICT infrastructures are embracing renewable energy for everything from earthquake mitigation in Japan to CO2e reduction in India. Fuel/power costs appear to have gone down since 2009 for off-grid mobile operations, but are still significant. Asia leads world in current renewable base stations and in growth potential. One operator - Indus Towers - now has 20,000 zero-diesel sites.

were critical of Apple's environmental stance a few years ago, saying that the company was positioned to be a leader rather than a a foot-dragger. Since then, the company has made significant strides, such as improvements to its take-back recycling programs*. On the downside, issues about its Chinese contract manufacturing operations have been slow to be resolved. Recent actions toward addressing labor issues need to be matched with ones addressing environmental issues. Factory pollution takes a toll on both workers and neighbors and a July 2013 report alleges problems still persist. Yet Apple continues to improve its environmental position in China - producing solar power is its latest initative.

"E-waste" and "cyber waste" describe the unwanted systems and components of our industry. Green organizations and facilities mitigate their e-waste impacts by repurposing and recycling equipment when scheduled for replacement. Despite all the focus on e-waste over the past decade, it continues to pollute communities around the world and threatens global ICT infrastructures. Yet no one cal agree on how much is actually out there.

We documented how the e-waste America ships overseas returns to threaten it's citizen's health. Now, we've learned how that e-waste also threatens America's national security.