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Imprint

Digitalcarbonfootprint.eu is a private project to visualize the effects of digital lifestyles based on my scientific work at the German research institute Oeko-Institut. There you can also find other relevant studies on the topics of sustainable digitalisation, energy-efficient data centres, green cloud computing and resource-efficient software. A short and easy-to-understand explanation of the method underlying the carbon footprint calculation is described in this blog article.
The translations into the various languages were kindly contributed by .

Contact
Jens Gröger
Bornholmer Straße 84
10439 Berlin
Germany
j.groeger(at)oeko.de
+49-30-405085-378

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Calculate the carbon footprint of your digital lifestyle based on scientific studies.

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Over the past few weeks Bitcoin's insane energy consumption took center stage in the media coverage regarding the popular cryptocurrency. This led to a lively debate, with some frequently returning claims being made. Let's examine some of the most common ones.
Note: all numbers in this article represent the network's situation per February 23, 2018.
Update: a new peer-reviewed academic paper titled " Renewable Energy Will Not Solve Bitcoin's Sustainability Problem " was published in Joule on March 14, 2019.

1. The numbers are wrong

It's important to realize that there is no way to verify the actual energy consumption of the Bitcoin network. The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index produces an estimate for this number based on a set of conservative assumptions, but of course there will always be those that argue we should be even more conservative. We'll probably never know who's right, but what we do know is that Bitcoin uses an insane amount of energy regardless of who is.

The most conservative method we could possibly use to estimate Bitcoin's energy consumption is by simply taking the total network computational power, and divide this number by the computational power of the most efficient Bitcoin mining machines. We know how much electricity these machines consume under ideal circumstances, so applying this method we would find an average electricity consumption of around 330 kilowatt-hours (KWh) per unique Bitcoin transaction (or around 22 TWh per year in total). This number doesn't include any of the additional cooling in a large-scale mining operation, older generations of mining machines, or any of the half a billion people who might be mining Bitcoin without even knowing it (the latter isn't part of the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index either), but it provides a lower bound that is still 200,000 times more than an average VISA transaction.

Taking the numbers from the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index we would end with an average energy consumption per unique Bitcoin transaction that's a lot closer to 455,000 times the average VISA transaction, but the numbers don't look good either way.

2. The comparison is flawed

Rather than arguing against the numbers, some will simply state that it's unfair to compare Bitcoin to VISA and it should be compared to the current financial system. In all honesty, if a Bitcoin transaction replaces a regular VISA transaction, it does seem more than fair to compare the two, but let's try to go along with the critics for now.

It was recently estimated that the total global banking system may be running on 100 TWh per year, compared to Bitcoin's 51 TWh per year. That means that Bitcoin only requires half of the amount of electricity required by the global banking system. Case closed? Not exactly.

The first problem with the numbers is that the estimate for the global banking system includes the infrastructure required to support cash (Bitcoin doesn't replace cash), and other infrastructure costs (light bulbs, cooling, etc.), while the estimate for Bitcoin includes only the cost of mining (there is an infrastructure surrounding Bitcoin as well). But let's ignore this, as there is a more important matter to focus on.

The number of global non-cash payments exceeds 500 billion per year, or 1.37 billion per day. Bitcoin handles around 200,000 transactions on a good day, meaning that the current global payment system handles 6,800 times more digital transactions per day than Bitcoin does. Even on this flawed comparison, Bitcoin still requires 3,400 times more energy than an average non-cash transaction. This just confirms that there is no way to make Bitcoin look any prettier.

Others try to do so by comparing Bitcoin to gold instead. This comparison is quite far-fetched, as gold doesn't have an inherent transaction limit, surging fees, or the possibility to duplicate the entire supply at will (eg. Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin Gold). It also doesn't make Bitcoin's sustainability problem go away either, as even gold mining is less energy-intensive than Bitcoin mining.

3. Bitcoin doesn't use that much energy in total

A popular narrative regarding Bitcoin's energy consumptions seems to be that even though Bitcoin uses an extreme amount of energy for what it does, in total it's still only a small part in the grand scheme of things. Being responsible for "only" 0.23% of the electricity consumption of the planet that's not untrue, as is it well within the margin of error for the electricity consumption estimate for the rest of the world. The obviously flaw in the narrative is that it lacks a proper justification for Bitcoin's extreme energy-inefficiency, and ignores that Bitcoin is a rapidly growing system. At the current pace, Bitcoin will soon require an increasingly significant part of the world's electricity.

4. More efficient miners will reduce energy consumption

Based on recent years the trend of increasing energy efficiency has actually led to an increase in energy consumption, so there's little support for this statement. Increasing efficiency by itself does little to change the total amount of energy consumed. If you can afford to spend $1,000 per day on electricity, that doesn't suddenly change if you get different machines (although it would allow you to employ more machines).

What did happen was that Bitcoin mining went from being a decentralized activity that anyone could participate in with their CPU/GPUs at home, to something only centralized mining facilities with specialized hardware (mostly in China) could do. This is the natural outcome of economies of scale, and it has led to a drop of the average price paid for a kilowatt-hour of electricity. Residential rates are typically around 12 cents USD for a KWh of electricity, while industrial-sized mining facilities typically pay 4 to 5 cents USD per KWh. The result? The same $1,000 can now pay for more than twice the amount of electricity.

5. Bitcoin will consume as much energy as the whole world by 2020

Bitcoin's energy consumption is in a bad situation, and certainly not improving, but predictions that the Bitcoin network will consume as much energy as the whole world by 2020 do seem a bit far-fetched. This prediction originally surfaced on grist, and followed from an extrapolation of the recent growth in Bitcoin's energy consumption as presented by the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index (the index itself only provides current and historic figures).

The prediction has two requirements to become a reality, the first one being that the Bitcoin mining revenues should be high enough to actually support such a massive electricity bill. At the moment, the revenues are nowhere near enough to actually make that happen, and the price of one Bitcoin should probably increase to well over a million USD to get it close to being enough. At that point, Bitcoin would be worth more than 17 trillion USD in total (the total value of the world's money is around 90 trillion USD currently).

If the former could somehow be achieved, the actual machines that are going to be running on all that energy still need to be produced. Manufacturers are already struggling to keep up with the current demand for Bitcoin mining machines, so they would need a near-infinite amount of resources and production capacity to actually deliver a massive number of new machines in such a short timeframe.

Altogether, the bottom line is that one should be careful in making extrapolations (especially exponential ones). A more conservative way to make a prediction about the future of Bitcoin mining would be to consider the current profitability of mining. As per today miners are earning around 8 billion USD per year. According to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index the costs of mining (mostly electricity) are about 2.5 billion USD per year (thus around 30% of total revenues), making it extremely profitable to add more machines to the network. This means that even though the current estimated energy consumption for the whole network is around 51 TWh per year, there is plenty of room for this number to double (as the current revenues could support it). Such an increase would put Bitcoin in the same range as the Netherlands, Argentina or Sweden in terms of electricity consumption. It will take some time to get to that point, but given current production estimates, this does seem like a plausible possibility within the next year.

6. Bitcoin's environmental impact is limited because it runs on renewable energy

One interesting line of thought is it wouldn't matter that Bitcoin is thousands of times less energy-efficient than the current system, if the whole system runs on renewable energy (which is the future we're heading to). We know this is certainly not the case at the moment (although parts of the network are being powered with hydroelectricity), but could we justify Bitcoin's energy-inefficiency if it was? It's actually not that hard to show that the answer to this question is no.

Regardless of the way electricity is produced, the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions are never equal to zero. This is simply because you have to account for emissions associated with manufacturing, construction, installation and decommissioning as well. Doing so, studies find that even hydropower still has a carbon footprint of 4 grams of CO2eq per KWh. This is significantly better than coal-based electricity which has a carbon footprint of up to 1 kilogram of CO2 per KWh, but it doesn't take a rocket-scientist to figure out that this improvement (being 250 times less) can never outweigh using several thousands of times more energy per transaction.

For the Bitcoin community the best course of action would now be to stop looking for excuses, and to start addressing the problem.

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Renewable Energy will not Save Bitcoin - Digiconomist

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Over the past few weeks Bitcoin's insane energy consumption took center stage in the media coverage regarding the popular cryptocurrency. This led to a lively debate, with some frequently returning claims being made. Let's examine some of the most common ones. Note: all numbers in this article represent the network's situation per February 23, 2018.

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Additional tools
Final Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules and Organisation Environmental Footprint Sector Rules
The final Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCRs) and Organisation Environmental Footprint Sector Rules (OEFSRs) can be used for calculating the Environmental Footprint profile for products and organisations in scope.

Final PEFCRs and OEFSRs are uploaded when finalised.

The PEFCRs and OEFSRs were developed according to version 6.3 of the Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules Guidance and the Organisation Environmental Footprint Sector Rules Guidance (additional documents referenced in the Guidance documents: Annex C and Life Cycle Inventory template).
Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCRs) Organisation Environmental Footprint Sector Rules (OEFSRs) Secondary data
The secondary data to be used when implementing PEFCRs and OEFSRs are available on the following Life Cycle Data Network nodes:

The final PEFCRs/OEFSRs are based on EF- compliant datasets tendered by the European Commission and available on the different data provider nodes above. The datasets are currently available in their fully aggregated form only. By the end 2019, the packaging datasets on the Thinkstep node will be made available in their disaggregated form. Until disaggregated datasets are not available, the users of the PEFCRs/OEFSRs cannot implement Option 2/Situation 2 of the Data Needs Matrix and cannot implement PEFCR/OEFSR rules that require disaggregated datasets.
Conditions of use of the secondary datasets
Final users are granted the non-exclusive right to use the LCI datasets and metadata under the following conditions:

The right of use shall include the rights to use, reproduce and adapt the datasets for all media and using all channels, methods and processes, whether known or unknown on the date hereof, for derivative use as part of the datasets to be used for implementing PEF or OEF studies in compliance with any of the PEFCRs/OEFSRs developed during the environmental footprint transition phase or those listed at this web page.

The reproduction right includes the right to reproduce all or part of the datasets on all current and existing media and, in particular the right to digitize the datasets, to save them on all media, to modulate, compress, decompress or use all other technical processes of the same type with regard to the digitized datasets for the purpose of the storage, transfer, IT processing, adaptation and/or use thereof.

The adaptation right includes the right to modify, reformat, extract or incorporate the datasets or any part thereof, assemble and incorporate the datasets, or any isolated component or part thereof, in any other work or document, by any means and using any technical or artistic process.

Said granting of rights shall be valid for the entire world and till 31st December 2021, except for the datasets on the node of Cycleco which are valid till 31st December 2020.

Please check the detailed end user license agreements (EULA) available on each data provider's node.
E-learning packages
The Environmental Footprint Helpdesk developed 3 e-learning tools for interested pilots. The aim of the tools is to help companies understand the Environmental Footprint and the type of information they will find in PEFCRs/OEFSRs. The e-learnings were prepared based on the draft PEFCRs/ OEFSRs.
Reports on the Environmental Footprint pilot phase Technical reports Other technical information
Environmental Footprint reference package: includes all the reference XML files structured in ILCD format, and additional documentation, to be used as baseline for EF compliant data development.

Developer's page for the creation of PEF/OEF data: includes the EF package, excel file (resuming the flow list, methods, characterisation factors, flow properties and unit groups) and Change Log of the items changed in the package from ILCD to EF (will be updated with changes for next updates), normalization and weighting factors, and related documentation.

General developers' page: contains common tools for ILCD and EF. Soda 4 LCA for node creation and data sharing, ILCD validation tool, and specific guidance for data sharing.

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the product environmental footprint pilots

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Single Market for Green Products - The Product Environmental Footprint Pilots - Environment - European Commission

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Additional tools Final Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules and Organisation Environmental Footprint Sector Rules The final Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCRs) and Organisation Environmental Footprint Sector Rules (OEFSRs) can be used for calculating the Environmental Footprint profile for products and organisations in scope. Final PEFCRs and OEFSRs are uploaded when finalised.

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Kleider machen Leute und die deutschen Konsumentinnen und Konsumenten sind Spitzenreiter, wenn es darum geht, sich neue Kleidung zuzulegen. Monatlich geben wir pro Person durchschnittlich 78 Euro für Bekleidung und Schuhe aus. Das entspricht pro Jahr etwa 18 kg an Bekleidung. Zum Vergleich: Weltweit…

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Autor: Björn Asdecker

Erklärung:
Die Summe der mit dem Rücktransport sowie den Bearbeitungsprozessen zusammenhängende Emissionen an Treibhausgasen, gemessen in CO2-Äquivalenten (CO2e).

Wie hoch ist die CO2-Bilanz einer Retoure in der Praxis?

Diese Frage ist unternehmensspezifisch zu beantworten. Allerdings sind viele Unternehmen nicht bereit derartige Informationen zu publizieren, weil sie damit Teile ihres Prozesses offenlegen müssten. In der Vergangenheit hat die Forschungsgruppe Retourenmanagement aus diesem Grund für den Wert einer Rücksendung den von DHL kommunizierten Wert einer ausgehenden Sendung in Höhe von 500g CO2e angesetzt [1].

Obwohl uns kein Händler bekannt ist, der die Treibhausgas-Emissionen pro Rücksendung veröffentlicht, ist es möglich, durch die Kombination verschiedener publizierter Datenpunkte eine Schätzung vorzunehmen. Von besonderem Interesse sind in diesem Zusammenhang die Daten von Modeversender, da diese den Großteil der Rücksendungen verantworten. Die Folgenden Ausführungen beziehen sich deshalb auf den Modeversender Zalando. Bezüglich dieses Unternehmens ist folgendes bekannt:

Der gesamte CO2-Fußabdruck belief sich 2017 auf 209.650 Tonnen CO2e [2].

Auf den Transport der Pakete zu den Kunden einschließlich der retournierten Sendungen entfallen davon 55 Prozent [2].

Zalandos Retourenquote liegt bei etwa 50 Prozent [3].

Zalando lieferte 2017 90,5 Mio. Bestellungen aus [2].

Aus diesen Daten lassen sich zwei weitere Größen berechnen. Erstens die Anzahl der an Zalando retournierten Sendungen, wenn man unterstellt, dass jede Bestellung zu einem Paket führt:

90,5 Mio. Bestellungen x 50 % = 45,25 Mio. Retourenpakete

Zweitens den auf die Rücksendungen entfallenden Teil der verursachten Emissionen:

209.650 t CO2e x 0,55 x (1-1/(1+0,5)) = 38.436 t CO2e

Aus der Kombination dieser beiden Größen ergibt sich der CO2e-Ausstoß pro Retourensendung:

38.436 t CO2e/45.25 Mio. Retourenpakete = 849 g CO2e pro Retourenpaket

Der ermittelte Wert von circa 850 g CO2e pro Retoure führt bei 280 Mio. Retourenpaketen in Deutschland zu einer Belastung von 238.000 Tonnen CO2e.

Die Schätzung ist aus unserer Sicht konservativ, da nicht jedes Unternehmen über die gleiche Prozesseffizienz wie Zalando verfügt.

Zusatzinformationen:
[1] http://www.umweltdialog.de/umweltdialog/verbraucher/2011-06-28_DHL_transportiert_alle_Privatkundenpakete_bundesweit_CO2-neutral_ohne_Aufpreis.php
[2] Zalando SE Geschäftsbericht 2017, https://annual-report.zalando.com/2017/fileadmin/user_upload/Images/Annual_Report/Download_Center/DE/zalando_se_geschaeftsbericht_2017.pdf
[3] https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/plus185244750/Zalando-Vorstand-Schneider-Retouren-gehoeren-ganz-klar-zum-Geschaeftsmodell.html

Quellennachweis:
Björn Asdecker (2022): "CO2-Bilanz einer Retoure - Definition", Online: http://www.retourenforschung.de/definition_co2-bilanz-einer-retoure.html, Abruf am: 28.05.2022.

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Autor: Björn Asdecker Die Summe der mit dem Rücktransport sowie den Bearbeitungsprozessen zusammenhängende Emissionen an Treibhausgasen, gemessen in CO2-Äquivalenten (CO2e). Wie hoch ist die CO2-Bilanz einer Retoure in der Praxis? Diese Frage ist unternehmensspezifisch zu beantworten. Allerdings sind viele Unternehmen nicht bereit derartige Informationen zu publizieren, weil sie damit Teile ihres Prozesses offenlegen müssten.

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The Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds has developed a model to reallocate the emissions from industries to the final consumer of products. This calculates the UK…