Category: data

data by Josh LepawskyAug 13, 20263:29 pm

CCU Webinar Series: What is ‘net positive water’? The case of Intel and Meta

knowledge politics by Josh LepawskyAug 10, 20263:03 pm

A satellite image of a tailings pond. From this altitude the pond appears as a large white mass with a bright blue water feature at the center.

Key concept: Upstream

Data centers are becoming politically potent infrastructure. But what happens before the severs they house are even put in place?

Discard Studies by Josh LepawskyJul 23, 20261:49 pm

Paper collage. A photograph of the Atomium in Brussels, cut into diagonal strips and reassembled over a grid of numbers.

PFAS and Geographies of Forever: semiconductor and data centre edition

I’ve just finished reading two important write-ups done for Chips Communities United on the use of PFAS chemicals in the tech sector, one about their presence in wastewater outflows from a semiconductor manufacturing site in Washington state (Siegel 2026b) and another about their use for cooling of data centres (Siegel 2026a). There’s a lot going on in both of these write-ups, so I want to draw out a few key points from each of them.

data by Josh LepawskyJan 21, 20265:20 pm

An animated time lapse of landscape change between the years 1990 and 2025. The major change demonstrated is from farmland to data center.

A recipe for finding and mapping data centres

Geographers like me are really interested in understanding landscape changes. I’ve been doing some research on how the infrastructure of digital life (e.g., data centers or semiconductor fabs) is inscribed into real locations, what that […]

data by Josh LepawskyJan 14, 20263:06 pm

Defamiliarizing ‘Tech’

In our book, Discard Studies: wasting, systems, and power, Max Liborion and I write about defamiliarization and problem framing. in the context of the book we’re talking about how personal experience with garbage and waste […]

Discard Studies by Josh LepawskyDec 1, 20241:17 am

Protected: Workshop: Participatory Planet

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Discard Studies by Josh LepawskyOct 22, 20249:13 am

What is insignificant impact?

US geopolitical worries, largely focused on rivalry with China, have given permission for the federal government to offer an overt industrial policy for semiconductor manufacturing. The US has embarked on a massively state funded program […]

Discard Studies by Josh LepawskySep 5, 202412:25 pm

"Current costs to remove perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs), a subclass of PFAS, from the environment at the same rate they are being added were estimated here at 20 to 7000 trillion USD per year."

--Ling, A.L. 2024. “Estimated Scale of Costs to Remove PFAS from the Environment at Current Emission Rates.” Science of the Total Environment 918. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.170647.

Discard Studies by Josh LepawskyJul 30, 202412:59 pm

Carbon Fixation

It is common practice for companies in the electronics sector to publish annual environmental reports. These reports can be very enlightening. After all, they represent a story about a given company in a situation in […]

data by Josh LepawskyJul 16, 20243:15 pm

Rebound Bites Google

Google’s new environmental report for 2024 is out and it makes some remarkable disclosures. Both The Register (Mann 2024) and The Guardian (Milmo 2024) have reported on the 48 percent rise in Google’s carbon output […]