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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?"
Speaking as an 8th grader, I can tell you it would be very useful. I'm probably rather biased, as I type extremely fast and it would be much easier to do my work on the computer then on paper, but I believe that it would be much easier for everyone to use a computer.
The primary reason is organization. It's a lot easier to find a file on a computer then it is in a notebook, plus everything you need is in one place, and it allows you to easily access another piece of work or study material after you finished something else.
well i'm happy in thinking that the worst is past in that most computers that even our grandmothers have are capable of all that most people do on a computer (web email word solitaire) so there's going to be less computers thrown out when upgrades come. plus the shift to laptops and lcds and thinner clients means even the wasted computers of the future will have less crap to them.
and as for schools, the thing we should look forward to the most is not laptops in the classroom but the classroom in the laptop. home based learning will take all the paper away and much of the commuting while moving social interactions into more realistic venues.
as long as we can make it another 30 years without trashing things to the point of extinction of all life i think we'll be at a point of permanently sustainable life. now is definitely the time to be trying extra hard.
I'm a tactil learner. So for me the act of writting notes is a learning process in itself (I rarely go back and reread them). typing just doesn't set into stone the same way hand writting does. Also, as someone else mentioned, its very awkward to type calculus
Waiting for the Blackouts... http://www.perkigoth.com/features/music/
Speaking as a CS student at a major university, I've watched the kids with laptops play games during lectures. There is no use during class, all a laptop will do is add to how much you have to pay up on your student loans when your school is over...
If you're an 8th grader at a Jr. High/Middle School I take it you must go to school in a ritzy area to want to actually haul your $1000+ (or even $200 old beater) laptop around all the rif-raf that go to most public schools these days...
Besides, aren't most 8th graders who use their computers too busy looking up pr0n and bragging about how cool they are because they have this warez and they "hack" aol with this and so on...
All it is is just another "show off" item to boost one's ego (as most in the computer industry will be very well aware of, that is, massive egos.) "Hey look at me I'm cool I have a laptop"
"My school has started requiring students to own and use laptops in all of their classes, under the pretext of saving paper."
/parents must pay for a laptop to be used in the classroom, they can limit the amount of paper materials that teachers are required to distribute. Teachers can then distribute most of their classroom materials and handouts electronically and eliminate a lot printing and copying. Copying costs and printing cost are a huge expense for the schools, and if this cost can be reduced by moving to electronic documents, then it would make financial sense for the school to do so.
I think everyone is assuming that the schools is doing this based on environmental factors (and maybe that is how it is being presented,) but I doubt that is actually the case. More likely they are looking at this from a cost savings standpoint for the school. If they can create a requirement in which the students
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.
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It's especially cute that the department at my college that seems the least inclined to grade and return my papers electronically rather than printing them out is the environmental studies department. The most inclined is the Math dept., where some professors won't even accept hardcopies anymore.
Plus, using electronic sources leads to paper wastage, too. A textbook is used over and over. If you hand students an electronic source, many of them will print it out, then throw it away. And again next year. And again. And again. And again.
And then there's all of the cute pictures people find on the 'net and print out. .
As you may know, Open Source has always lagged far behind in many 'consumer' type of features. Among the most prominent are 'power saving' modes featured on many of the newer PCs. The subsystems, of hardware, BIOS, and operating systems, reduce the amount of power consumed by the computer when it is not in use, and thus save energy and the environment. However, it is clear that by eschewing these features as being for 'lame desktop windoze lusers', the open source community firmly establishes itself as standard American energy sucking social reprobates, unconcerned about the fate of the rest of the planet, and not caring one whit if the entire nation collapses just like California did last year. In this article I show just how much energy would be wasted if people did, in fact, switch to linux or BSD.
.083 * 120 = 9 watts. Thats pulling all the time. Day and night. 24/7. Now, lets say I have this thing plugged in all year. Thats 8760 hours. The power company measure this stuff in 'kilowatt-hours', so how many of those am I using? 9 watts * 8760 hours = 78,840 watt-hours, or 78 kilowatt hours. At 14 cents a kilowatt hour in my district, I have payed 11 dollars to the power company this year for my computer system to do absolutely nothing at all. Not even be turned on.
The way to calculate power consumption of a computer is relatively simple and will cost about 50 bucks. First you need to get a multimeter that can measure AC current up to a few amperes. The next step is to get a 3 prong power cord. After that get some connector thingies and a wire stripper/crimper. Then take the hot wire of the power cable and split it and make it so you can plug the multimeter into it, in series w the circuit to measure. In this case, a computer.
Next, power is measured in watts. A good familiar yardstick is lightbulbs, with 60 watt being pretty normal to see in ceilings in people's houses. Volts * amps = watts, and since the voltage will be roughly 110-120 volts, (measure w a voltage meter if u wanna be exact), you can multiply the number on the ammeter by 120 to find out how many watts the computer system is using up.
Now, surprisingly, in 'off' mode, power supplies and monitors and so forth draw current. 83 milliamps in my case.
Now let's say I turn it on! My system draws roughly 0.66 Amps with windows running. When I start an open gl game its 0.68A. If i decide to unplug the fan that saves me 0.02A. basically, though, its roughly 0.66 Amps.
If I left my computer on full blast all the time, hard disk going, monitor on, etc, this is what it costs me to be up 24/7. 0.66Amp * 120v = 79.2 Watts. 8760 hours in a year at 79.2 watts makes roughly 693,000 watt-hours, or 693 kilowatt hours. Again at 14 cents per, thats about 97 USDollars worth of electricity a year for the computer to be on.
But the nice folks at Microsoft, being tree hugging hippies and all, have implemented easy to use, reliable, and safe 'power saving' mode. This mode will make your hard disk stop spinning, and on suitable monitors will turn them off as well. Now, how much power does this actually save? Well, you can measure it. Just wait a few minutes for the comptuer to go into power saving mode.
In my case, when the monitor goes into sleepy mode, (the orange sleepy light instead of the green power light on the monitor case) consumption plummets from 0.66 Amps to 0.27 Amps. All because of an operating system software feature interacting properly with the a simple monitor hardware feature that has been around at least 5 years. Now when the hard disk shuts off, it goes down even more to about 0.23 Amps. Now, with the hard disk not spinning and heating in my machine, I could theoretically shut the case fan off and save another 0.02 amps... but my box doesn't do that. Anyways, there is even a 'more power saving mode', its called 'suspend' mode I believe, and that drops me down to a low low 0.20Amps. I guess it shuts down some circuits on the motherboard as well as the HD and monitor. I don't know.
I've been researching environmental effects of electronics in general, I have some information about the topic. For example, "computers discarded over the next 5 years [2000 to 2005] will place more than 1 billion pounds of lead into the waste stream" (European Union 2000). If you want my references (bibliography), email me xenotrout@arabia.com
> If anything, computers can lead to MORE paper use.
Oh yes. I've been trying to convince faculty to make their PPTs more general and NOT required to print out to get a good grade. My comments have fallen mostly on deaf ears, but I think some people are thinking about this.
The real issue is that PPT is a poor-mans text book. Okay, so Jane Professor has had her book rejected eighteen times. So she pushes an abridged version of her rejected book in PPT format. Everyone prints it out and take notes on it. Score: Professor's ego 1, envinronment 0. It wouldn't be so bad if we didn't have to buy another book, usually VERY underutilized, for the class because of department requirements. Worse, these types of teachers always have it in for the required book. Really now, your half-assed PPTs are no substitute for a decent book on the subject, a book with an index, and clearly labeled chapters.
Some professors do use PPT properly: as outlines to lectures and not as quasi-books. These outlines rarely need to be printed out as the notes you take in your notebook work just as well.
There are some serious usability issues with PPT becoming the new micro-publishing. It wouldnt be so bad if we all had tablet laptops that we could take notes right on with a stylus, but that ain't gonna happen anytime soon, if ever.