Esg Report for Technology Industry

ESG Report for Technology Industry

ESG Report for Technology Industry

Nowadays people are living in a high-tech world. Human beings are cooperating with technology to make their life easier and more convenient. They are using remote viewfinders to control household appliances and their cars, and using machines instead of labors as well. According to the leaders of a global technology sector, ‘technology is not only fueling major business transformation across industries, it’s also changing how technology enterprises sell their P&S, operate, plan and future growth’ (Paul and Sallomi, 2016). In this essay, both the benefits and damages of technology to the environment, society and governance sectors will be discussed, and the negative influences will be mainly explained in this essay.

Environment

The rapid growth of technology industry will certainly result in environmental damage. It is undoubted that technology industry pollutes the natural resources especially the water and air. Those big OEMs take up huge tracts of land in many countries and many of them dump the polluted water and batteries into lakes or seas. As Akgun ilhan (2014) said, the mobile phone industry has attracted numerous serious environment problems which water issue is most related to the future of human beings. In other words, although many mobile phone operators and manufacturers try to reduce their damaging, the pollution is still inevitable. Take the manufacturing process of a common mobile phone as an example, a mobile phone is made by plastic, metal and glass components. First of all, the transportation of raw materials to the factory will consume fuels on the road. These fuels create a large water footprint because of extraction and refining. After these materials transported to the factory, they are used for component production. During the production process, water is indispensable as well. After phones are made in the assembly lines, they are packaged and shipped to many parts of the world (Akgun, 2014). It is out of question during the phone production process, a huge amount of water is used.

Another issue is water pollution. Still using mobile phone industry as an example. HTC in China is one of the biggest phone companies in China which occupies many urban lands. But a report made by the institute of Public and Environmental Affairs shows that the corporation is dumping wastewater which contains heavy metals into the rivers. These heavy metals’ hazard index is much higher than allowed level by Chinese Government. Much pollution leads to difficulties for Chinese Government to repair the environment currently (Akgun, 2014).

Society

The impacts technology industry brings to the society are most obvious. The impacts can be divided into both advantages and disadvantages. It is well-known that each technology company has its own database of customers but how these companies deal with these private secrets received most concerns from customers. As more technology companies’ databases are theft or lost, governments are promoting more detailed privacy regulation acts than before. One of the most famous accidents happened in Yahoo Corporation. In the second half of 2014, a hacker group attacked Yahoo’s information storage providers and stole above 500 million personal user data. This accident directly resulted Yahoo Corporation lost large number of customers and profit (Robert, 2016). Moreover, many technology corporations are cooperating with local governments. Hence, sometimes government may ask these corporations to provide customer personal data for national security use, such as Facebook. However, these corporations all have their own privacy rules and regulations, if they provide these data to government without customers’ permission, does it mean these corporations are violating the rules.