During the Covid-19 pandemic, people learned a valuable lesson that they could not stay without smartphones and gadgets. The internet remained a crucial aspect of their lives during this time, from buying groceries to watching new movies, telehealth, and medical services. Everything was available on the internet. However, this experience of the people diversified when the countries quickly moved to the latest generation of today’s technology – the 5G technology.

The mere promise of 5G

For every ten years, the world has consistently faced a drastic technological shift, which changes yearly. From 1G in the 1980s to 5G, which began its deployment in 2019, the world has seen significant improvement. The fifth-generation technology provides a reliable communication mode and enhanced broadband solutions for all cell phones and digital gadgets. Since it has low latency (delay in the communication), it provides more capacity due to the use of fewer frequencies in the spectrum. This technology feature spread like wildfire and made it possible to spread the technology worldwide. It can be applied almost anywhere, from intelligent cars to sensors and machine-to-machine communications.

How can 5G help the Environment?

The invention of 5G technology is a boon to protect and preserve the Environment. It is also one of the main points of attraction for delivering intelligent cities using IoT technologies. In addition to this, some of the other benefits include:

• Reducing water pollution
• Diminishing the number of greenhouse gases
• Minimizing the amount of sewage water
• Protecting wildlife
• Understand the weather
• Enhancing waste reduction, and many more

Potential negative impacts on the Environment

Despite the benefits of the 5G technologies, certain demerits are due to radiation and other such factors, which will harm humans and animals. In addition to this, the manufacture of this technology means building new infrastructure with a multitude of different devices, which leads to the following negative impacts:

• Further energy consumption and emission: According to statistics, information and communication technology accounts for almost four percent of global warming due to carbon emissions and radiation from electronic devices.
• Life cycle impacts: This talks about the post-carbon economy, which does not include power generation and gas, whose energy consumption increases by 9 percent yearly.
• E-waste: When consumers worldwide start consuming networks from 5G phones, it will increase the carbon footprint and enhance the E-waste to an enormous amount which can cause many global problems to the neighborhood and the Environment.

Sustainable 5G methods

Some strategies can be implied to lessen harmful environmental impacts and make the technology more sustainable. Doing so will not only protect the Environment, but it will also help in increasing the capability of the network Here are some of them:

• Decarbonization
• Efficient cooling methods
• Biodegradable sensors
• Recycling toxic materials
• Network sharing; and many more