Investigating the Sustainability of the 5G Base Station Overhaul in the United States

5G is a high-bandwidth low-latency communication technology that requires deploying new cellular base stations. The environmental cost of deploying a 5G cellular network remains unknown. In this work we answer several questions about the environmental impact of 5G deployment, including: Can we reuse minerals from discarded 4G base stations to build 5G or does 5G require new minerals that were not required in 4G base stations? And, how sustainable is this transition? We answered these questions buy surveying the minerals needed to build 5G base stations. We found that the key technologies behind 5G require additional rare-earth metals to build essential semiconductor components needed for 5G, such as yttrium, barium, gallium, and germanium. Additionally, since 5G needs many more base stations than 4G network to achieve the same coverage, we describe how 5G will likely increase the use of materials like copper, gold, and aluminum, all of which are difficult or impractical to recycle from the 4G base stations they will replace. We estimate that to provide coverage comparable to 4G in the United States, we will need about 600 million 5G base stations, which will consume thousands of tons of these metals and significant amount of fossil fuels, as well as will result in releasing toxic gases during material mining and refining. Despite these environment costs, we also describe the environmental benefits that a 5G network can offer.