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Data centers are full of servers that have an average life span of 2-3 years with a growing trend toward more frequent replacements. AKCP industry group estimates in 2021 there were approximately 18-million servers in data centers around the world (up from 11-million in 2006). This means that each year millions of servers enter the formal and informal trade of global e-waste. When these devices enter the informal market, they often end up in landfills, many located in the Global South, where e-waste workers are exposed to dangerous toxic metals and chemicals that have long-term health and environmental impacts.

Community Spotlight

In 2014, the coalition to protect Prince William County formed in Northern Virginia to resist a 110-foot-tall, 230 kV transmission line from cutting through the foothills of the Bull Run Mountains and across the Rural Crescent. Residents soon learned the new line was required to service a single bulk-load customer: Amazon, and its two newly built data centers. Once the coalition prevented routes that would cut through the rural area, they redirected their efforts to fight alongside another coalition, the Alliance to Save Carver Road, comprised largely of elderly homeowners who are descendants of freed slaves. After a long four-year battle, together, the community successfully petitioned the Virginia State Corporation Commission to require Dominion Energy to bury the transmission line along the Interstate Highway.

Paving over rural and agricultural lands foregoes potential alternative land uses that could actively reduce carbon. In Southern California, a local coalition of environmental activists, farmers and residents protesting a warehouse presented an alternative plan for the land use that would employ techniques to increase food security, reduce carbon emissions, reduce heat island effect, and sequester carbon into the soil.

Land could also be used to build solar or wind farms to help ease the transition from fossil fuel power sources. The long-term loss of open land represents a loss in the ability to reimagine the land use for other purposes and the foreclosure of alternative earthly configurations.