Environmental Costs of Computer Use?

arhines asks: "I'm working on a little research project to figure out what the environmental cost of heavy technological reliance is, and want any suggestions Slashdot has for factors to consider. My school has started requiring students to own and use laptops in all of their classes, under the pretext of saving paper. Having read about the problems with computer recycling on Slashdot, I've become suspicious of the true effect of having several hundred computers thrown out each year. What statistics should I focus on, and are there any definitive studies on the topic you could point me to?"

Comments

Environmental cost?

[Uber Banker]

environmental benefit too, a double edged sword, we just have to make sure we don't always strick with one side.

Saving paper

[Glonoinha]

Saving paper is a pretty bad reason to give college kids laptops. There are good reasons, but saving paper isn't one of them.

Re:Saving paper

[wmspringer]

If anything, computers can lead to MORE paper use.

I've had several classes where the professor made thier powerpoint slides available online, and some people would go and print out the entire presentation before class; they eventually ended up changing the system so you had to be logged in to print and putting a cap on how much each person could print per semester.

Re:Saving paper

[Anonymous Coward]

The school he is referring to is not a college or university. It appears to be a secondary school. How useful would it be for a 7th grader to have a laptop for all their work? Also, it seems like it would be hard to keep them from playing games in class.

Re:Saving paper

[Tackhead]

> Saving paper is a pretty bad reason to give college kids laptops. There are good reasons, but saving paper isn't one of them.

If I'm in a room where someone's talking and scribbling equations on a blackboard, I can do a much better job of recording what's important with pencil and paper than I could ever fantasize about punching into a laptop, and I'm a touch typist.

I've played with everything from Word or TeX, and I don't know any way of entering a differential equation or a matrix into a computer that's faster than just scribbling it down with a layer of graphite on a dead tree. (Besides, how the hell could I hear the professor with all the damn click-clicking of 100 keyboards? :-)

I believe in using the best tool for the job. Laptops are a good tool for many applications, but taking notes in class ain't one of them.

Re:Saving paper

[(54)T-Dub]

It is for this reason that I have never used a laptop in school.
Seems to me that they should require students to use recycled paper instead. Of course I feel that everybody should use recycled paper. We've taught people to recycle, now we need to teach them to purchase the damn products. Otherwise the recycled paper won't be cheaper than normal paper until tree's are so rare that they cost more to chop down.

Re:Saving paper

[yintercept]

Paper printouts are still the most standardized mechanism for communication. I could see the university's hope that by requiring computers, they create another standardized mechanism for communication.

But I have to admit, the impulse to print is strong. In the info age, printing is an activity that makes you feel like you are actually doing something. It is odd working 12 hour shifts at a desk and having nothing that physically represents the days' work. Just changing the pattern of 1s and 0s on a hard disk is an odd way to make a living. Printing the web page makes it look like you did something.

[ctrl-p] look at 10 page print out of /. jabber and file under My Contribs to the Universe.

Re:Saving paper

[khuber]

How would you enter equations and diagrams? Whip out Mathematica and Visio? I don't think so. Not while keeping up with a lecture.

The sound of people typing would drive me nuts.

Computers sound like a horrible distraction kids would be better off without in the classroom. (Note that I make an exception for blind students for whom a laptop may be a great option as mechanical braille machines are very noisy.)

Paper works just fine and you're not out $1000+ if it gets stolen. Frankly, I'm not even a huge supporter of computers being a significant part of education at all. The idea of requiring laptops for anything but a private school seems unnecessary to me.

Re:Saving paper

[nyseal]

Your point is valid, however some of us 'elders' had to actually sit down with a book, a pen(cil), a calculator and a piece of paper to do our homework. This simple process is what gives young minds the necessary abilities to NOT rely on a machine to do their thinking for them (calculator exception). Can you possibly imagine what the scientists and engineers of Saturn I had to go through? The first space flights (and even now, to a certain extent) had to have actual charts and graphs on board to help them figure out complex mathmatical compuitations; along with a pen & paper. I'm not saying that current technology shouldn't be relied upon, but not at the sacrifice of good old fashioned learning.

Re:Saving paper

[Bush Pig]

The beaut thing about using a slide rule (or log tables or just pen and paper for that matter) is that you _must_ have a pretty good idea of the order of magnitude of the answer before you start, which is a far, far better thing than having a very precise, hopelessly inaccurate, answer. I don't regard this as harmful, and yes, I am an olde fogey (I didn't even have a slide rule at high school).

I'm also dubious about the benefits of kids using computers at school (unless they're learning to program or type) - they _don't_ save paper in my experience (as a number of others have already pointed out), and they are more likely to be a distraction than a help. In fact, I always remember something better if I write it out (as I said, I'm old).

Did they do any cost analysis?

[YetAnotherName]

There are so many hidden costs that the mind boggles at the prospect. An edict like "Use Laptops" handed down from on high is highly suspect.

Consider: laptops have batteries, batteries require charging, charging comes from wall outlets, wall outlets require power generation, most power generation is from coal. (I use a similar argument in my choice to use disposable diapers with my child: cloth diapers require water, solvents, and sewers.)

When I was an undergraduate, we were forbidden from having microwave ovens in our dorm rooms. (I realize I'm showing my age here.) The reason? They used too much electricity. The university would have to raise dorm room prices across the board to accomodate those few people who used microwave ovens.

My coworkers say I'm an amazingly fast typist, but a lot of people can get by with a few scribbles even quicker than I can and still make sense of it. Such a regimentalizing of laptops could well affect students' capability for learning. It's one thing to recommend them, another thing to mandate them.

Re:Did they do any cost analysis?

[Anonymous Coward]

(I use a similar argument in my choice to use disposable diapers with my child: cloth diapers require water, solvents, and sewers.)

So does treating your own solid waste. Do we throwing solid waste into a landfill? Do we wear a shirt once and then throw it out? No, because there's more efficient ways to deal with the issues of waste and cleaning clothing. Disposable diapers require oil and more materials than a cloth diaper because they're not reusable.

Impractical?

[wmspringer]

Looking at the site, this isn't college; this is a combined middle school / high school.

Now, my experience with high school students (I work with an 11th grade class that meets in a computer lab) is that, given access to computers, the first things they do are check their email and start loading up websites containing either games or (depending on gender) romance or sports information.

Computers are certainly a great tool - I can't even do my work without internet access anymore, since I'm constantly looking up a research paper or TeX command I need - but at the middle school level, it sees as if you're going to have to devote a lot of time making the students close off the games and get back to work..

Paperless Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Since switching to a paperless office we now consume twice as much paper as we did before we moved to paperless

why don't you do something important like

[the_2nd_coming]

figure our how to suck out the radioactivity of radioactive wastes.

Tackle the BIG environmental waste

[Charlton Heston]

Children. Don't worry about how much your computer uses, it's nothing compared to the resources a person uses.

Do everyone a favor and stop at one kid.

Someone's going to mark me as a troll here, but what I'm saying is the truth. Not many people want to hear it though.

In other words

[DNS-and-BIND]

In other words, "Hey, slashdot, I have an axe to grind. I hate humanity and I would like to write a paper about how computers are destroying the rain forest. Will someone write my paper for me?"

This kind of question is really a $10 question more suited for Google Answers.

Get with the program

[RhettLivingston]

You're not in college to learn how to think. You're there to lose all of that wasteful morality and learn how to be a good little consumer in this brave new world.

Re:AOL CDs

[wmspringer]

They're handy to have around, though. I never have the buy coasters..

To bring this somewhat back on-topic, I wonder if AOL has considered including more software on the CDs. The AOL software probably doesn't take up all of the available space (anybody know how much?), so if they were to include something useful on the CD, it might encourage people to keep them instead of automatically throwing them out.

Wouldn't you be more likely to keep a CD that said "1000 hours of AOL + free Commander Keen game!"?

You must have attended private school or have read

[stomv]

the school's website to understand what's at work here.

This isn't about saving paper. It's about making parents feel good about dropping $15,000 a year on high school... after all, the kids use laptops in their classes; our investment in little Johnny will result in opportunities that those poor kids in public school won't have. Don't waste your time thinking about environmental impact. This is marketing.

I went to a private school as well, one of the high-falutin' variety. I loved every minute of it, even if I was a scrubby kid from a lower class neighborhood with a penchant for cynicism, science, and lacrosse. I'm not suggesting your school is good or bad for their decision. If the result of this policy is that more kids with a polished high school education find their way to techie universities instead of the standard small liberal arts colleges most attend now, than I'd consider the policy a good one.

It's not an environmental issue. It's also not a cost issue -- if your parents (or some donor) can afford to send you to a top notch snoot school, than they can afford to buy you a laptop too. It'll come to less than 3% of the overall cost of your high school education. It's a marketing decision, and headmasters, chancellors, and presidents of schools across the country are making the same decisions, based on a poor understanding of IT but a solid understanding of their potential customers.

Laptop Vs. CRT vs. Education

[billstewart]

The real question is what it will do for your education, and whether they can take advantage of all students having laptops vs. some but not all students having individual or shared computers. Do they know how to use them for teaching? Do the teachers know more than the kids? (or at least, enough teachers for it to be useful?) Cliff Stoll has lots of things to say about this.

And even aside from the teaching, do the classrooms have enough *electricity* for them? You can't depend on a laptop having more than an hour's battery life, in spite of what the ads said when they were brand new (which was usually overoptimistic then, and battery life decreases rapidly as machines get to be a couple of years old, so the _seniors_ are definitely going to need to plug in their machines if they haven't replaced the ones they bought freshman year.) On the other hand, if schools can use them to replace paper copies of textbooks, so the kids who are getting new laptop weight to carry around in their backpacks can leave their books back in their rooms, that may be a win. Works fine for classical literature (anything out of copyright, i.e. pre-Disney), but not so hot for most of the textbook market.

They're not going to save any natural resources by having you use computers instead of paper. Nor will they save money. Sure, the paper you use in a year will probably outweigh the computer, but you'll spend more than $100/year on computers, while you won't conceivably use that much paper writing by hand :-) And computers encourage you to print stuff a lot more than you'd expect, unless they make *that* inconvenient.

The real environmental costs have to include the disposal costs of the equipment. Laptop LCD screens are much smaller and lighter than CRTs, and other people have talked about the leaded glass and phosphor problems with CRTs. LCDs are semiconductor-based, which means there's a certain amount of toxic waste involved in the production; I don't know if it's more or less than monitors. Fortunately, Nickel Cadmium batteries are a thing of the past, but how toxic are the current battery technologies?

And how long do these things last, and how upgradable are they? Laptops are usually slower than desktops made at the same time, with smaller disks and RAM for the money. How many years will they last before being obsolete? My experience carrying a laptop around as a business traveller and train commuter was that they're not super-durable, especially the ones that are light enough that you're willing to carry them around all that time. How will they survive students?

Re:well

[donnz]

If one buries the paper that will act as a corbon sink counteracting some of the effects of global warming. Worth considering if your country is a signatory to the Kyoto accord (read everyone except the USA & Australia). Even better, if you bury the paper under water you will be making a contribution to future generations' fossil fuel supplies...

Environmental cost of production

[Phronesis]

A significant part of the environmental cost of computers is expended in manufacturing the computer, before you even buy it. Semiconductor and PC board manufacturing use tremendous quantities of fresh water (about ten gallons per chip and a total of 8,000 gallons per computer), which has serious environmental consequences in the American West and in many parts of the third world. Of course, as long as the state of California subsidizes its rice farmers' water, there are more important places to complain about this.

Also, semiconductor manufacturing uses lots of quite nasty chemicals and while the organics can be incinerated, the heavy metals are difficult to dispose of safely for the long term and there is always the inevitable discharge of toxic pollutants into the air or water surrounding the factory.

Finally, both manufacturing and operating computers use lots of electricity, which is usually generated by plants that produce lots of greenhouse gases.

Besides worrying about recycling, you also want to worry about all these environmental costs.

Is this really possible?

[Tailhook]

Is it even reasonable to expect to calculate the 'environmental' cost of a laptop?

Just calculating the environmental cost of a piece of paper appears insurmountable. Just how accurately (read, credibly) can this be done? What exactly is the environmental cost of a lumberjack taking a dump after hours? Since having paper requires a certain percentage of us be lumberjacks, we must consider the entire cost of having them. A truck used in hauling lumber has environmental effects across the entire planet; from fossil fuels to iron ore. Never mind that it probably has several computers on board and the whole calculation goes recursive (trucks making computers to make trucks...)

Now consider a laptop. Plastics, solder, various exotic bits like tantalum, manufacturing resources on multiple continents using a huge variety of techniques, transportation costs for all of the above... Here's a cost to consider; the environmental impact of supporting the guy who wrote the BIOS for the laptop, for that short period of his life that he did the work, and the time during which he was educated to do it. He most likely used a computer for that and once again we go recursive (computers making computers...) Just how far do you think you can take this?

Slashdot posted a story about the true cost of making a memory chip. Many posters were quick to point out that the water used in the process was recycled on the spot multiple times. The original story left the impression that the water was entirely consumed, but actually left the matter entirely ambiguous by not being clear about what the water figure actually meant. Naturally the suspicion is that the author intended to be ambiguous because it has more impact to say 'umpteen gallons per chip.' In the end the story assigned some dollar figure to the results and condemned modern technology as another great western destroyer of the environment.

How are environmental costs calculated? If I go strip mine an acre, presumably something somewhere much have incurred a cost. That spot of land? It's still there. Nothing is growing on it now, but it's still there. Eventually something will grow on it again. So are we to attempt to prorate a cost to that period of time between the moment the acre was last 'pristine' until the moment it once again represents something environmentally sound? Is there a price sheet somewhere we're working from?

At the very least admit the extreme ambiguity of any such endeavor. If you are concerned that acknowledging this would ruin some presupposed result, you really need to reconsider your motives. Too much of the research coming from the environmental movement reeks of junk science and is dismissed out of hand. You risk creating something that has the appearance of a result created to drum up outrage. If you want to influence my skeptical mind you need to be absolutely scrupulous in avoiding that. Just calculate. Don't even mention the word 'western.' Avoid ambiguity. Acknowledge this real limits of what can be known.

To what end?

[node 3]

Life, by it's very nature, by it's very definition, requires consumption. Everything every living creature does involves consumption.

Everything that goes into owning a computer (from the mining of metals, creation of plastics and glasses, manufacturing, transportation, packaging, the byproducts of the people involved in all those steps, the cost of electricity, the cost of the glasses you now need to see because of focusing on such a close target, the microwave radiation from your 802.11b network connection, a rah-rah and etc, and so-on so-on so-on) added together will not cause all the trees on the planet to die, the o-zone layer to deplete, the oceans to stop emitting carbon-dioxide, the rain to have a pH so low as to eat through your skin, one one salmon or spotted owl to die. The planet is huge, and chock full of resources, and not only that, but those resources are constantly replenished via life's ability to fill any niche available to it. It's a complex system which constantly adjusts to feedback.

On the other hand, owning that computer will give jobs to many who wouldn't have them, will give you access to the largest repository of knowledge ever assembled by humanity, will put you in direct (virtual) contact with millions (billions?) of people, enhance your ability to take the ideas of your mind and realize them in reality.

So I ask, to what end is your inquiry directed?

Re:Even worse when you get to homework

[gregmac]

My experience has been that even if a paper is submitted to a teacher or professor (I played this game five years ago in high school), the teacher immediately prints it and pulls out a red pen rather than grading it electronically.

I think this has to do with the fact that paper is easier to look at. If you have to read 100 papers, sitting at the computer reading is a lot harder on your eyes than looking at paper. Not to mention, you can sit back in a chair and read papers, while typically you have to sit at a desk to use the computer (or at least with a laptop sitting in your lap - which gives off heat, feels heavy after a while, etc).

Until there's a better way to read data electronically (and theres some promising ideas), hitting that shiny print button is still easier.

Re:Even worse when you get to homework

[Com2Kid]

• My experience has been that even if a paper is submitted to a teacher or professor (I played this game five years ago in high school), the teacher immediately prints it and pulls out a red pen rather than grading it electronically.

For a damn good reason. Do you realize how hard it is to correct a paper digitally? Even the best digital pen systems out there are no match for a good old ball point pen.

Also, the way the human eye scans documents when reading them off of a computer screen (scrolling et all) encourages far more mistakes and necessitates multiple readings to catch the same number of mistakes as one read through of a hard copy.

notes scribbled on paper also have automatic "version / draft" management. Just select the word that you like best from all those jotted down. . .

Re:Even worse when you get to homework

[simong_oz]

My experience has been that even if a paper is submitted to a teacher or professor (I played this game five years ago in high school), the teacher immediately prints it and pulls out a red pen rather than grading it electronically.

Well, speaking from experience I can honestly say that grading a paper electronically is a right pain in the arse. It's almost downright impossible if it's mathematically heavy (as in lots of equations, something computers and word processors especiall are still not very good at).

When I grade/mark a paper I tend to make a lot of comments, not just read it and put a mark on it. I could do that electronically but I've always felt that unless I'm giving something a perfect mark I owe it to the student to give them helpful comments. Whether they take any notice of them of course, is another matter!