Nokia pleaded its case to put the world on a path to recovery in a paper released today outlining the company’s commitment to realizing its vision of an ethical and sustainable 5G world and calling on global, local, and individual collaborative action to make it happen.

Flash forward: Life in 2030 stresses the influence of technological innovation in fundamentally transforming the way we communicate, consume, and live as it relates to the accelerating rollout of 5G. 

Digital technologies like 5G IoT, edge computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), are pushing boundaries as their adoption becomes more widespread, but the constant network traffic they generate is also pushing infrastructure and energy consumption to its limits. As we enter the next generation of mobile communication, these technologies will be the forces that power the Fourth Industrial Revolution — similar to how steam, electricity, and silicon powered the previous three. 

“Ubiquitous connectivity will transform how cities, industries, healthcare, education, government, and home life function and flow,” Nokia writes. The reach of ultra-reliable, low-latency communications, network slicing, edge services, and converged access to all “will underpin a future based on the principles of equality, trust, sustainability and people first,” the paper says.

Nokia contends that global decisions on the implementation of technology are "too vast for any single company, industry or government to make or enact alone." However, Nokia’s vision and 5G sustainability efforts alone aren’t enough without active collaborative global transformation across borders, sectors, and generations.

Furthermore, Nokia's 5G vision calls for implementing sustainable and circular design choices, advocating for the right to digital inclusion, creating rules for the ethical use of technology, and frameworks for evaluating the carbon footprint and handprint of 5G.

GSMA Chairman Stéphane Richard said during his keynote at MWC Los Angeles 2019 that the mobile industry faces three omnipresent challenges it must overcome before it can collectively deliver 5G. Among those challenges is the loss of trust in businesses’ ability to deliver sustainable growth for the entire industry.

A growing number of people are also asking questions that the industry must answer in a more forceful but honest manner, he said. “Do we really need 5G? Do we want our lives to become even more digital? We have to find responsible answers to these questions.”

Richard argued that 5G will lessen the industry’s impact on the environment compared to previous generations of network technology because it can be directional and concentrated toward active users rather than diffusing signals everywhere.

The world produced approximately 50 million tons of e-waste in 2018, according to a report from the Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy (PACE) and the United Nations’ E-Waste Coalition. That number is expected to skyrocket as network operators, vendors, and device makers prepare to deploy the next generation of 5G devices. However, the magnitude of the transition will come at a monumental cost to the environment.

The GSMA forecasts 40% of the world’s population will be covered by 5G networks by 2025, and 25 billion IoT connections will be live within the next five years. “Our responsible leadership of the industry can make a difference,” Richard said.

As the saying goes “out with the old, in with the new,” but when it comes to technology and devices – specifically the millions of smartphones, modems, and other gadgets incompatible with 5G networks – even if 5G networks and devices are designed to be more energy efficient than their predecessors, what will come of the obsolete discarded electronics?