Slashdot Mirror
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?"
environmental benefit too, a double edged sword, we just have to make sure we don't always strick with one side.
Saving paper is a pretty bad reason to give college kids laptops. There are good reasons, but saving paper isn't one of them.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Abacus:
* Requires no power.
* Portable.
* Scalable. Just add more beads.
* Ultra-stable.
* Low cost of entry.
* Lasts indefinitely.
* Reboots by shaking!
* Completely royalty free. Open Source.
* Recyclable. Pass it down to your kids!
* Secure. No one can hack your abacus.
* No need to localize to other languages.
* No install package needed.
* One interface to learn (forget Aqua, Luna, KDE, Gnome, etc).
* Friendly to modders (wood, bamboo, aluminum?).
No internet access or Office-like apps though.
Damn straight. If you want to save paper, force all students to use 9 pin dot matrix printers. That way .. the noise and time consumption of printing ANYTHING will make them think twice about frivously printing unnecessary crap. Not like laser printers where it takes only seconds and is silent.
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.
I would buy myself a laptop just to save all the time, soap, and water I use washing off the side of my left hand after writing with pencil. I need to save those whales, you know.
Start with the fact that computers get obsolete pretty quickly when compared to many other things we buy. So maybe every three or four years, we're stuck with a lot of computer hardware that is hard to dispose of or get rid of. It's hard to sell a four year old computer since the technology moves so quickly: their resale value plummets with every faster model.
Next think about how on earth do you recycle a computer? It's not a soda can or paper. What often happens is the parts are sold off and shipped to China, where people in villages are paid to take the computer components apart to get at the trace metals ... in the process leaking all kinds of toxins into the water supply. Great.
Last, I recall a study showing that the paperless office has been exposed to be a myth. While on the surface it would seem having computers everywhere would save paper, the truth of the matter is more paper is consumed. I'm sure you know of people (mostly execs and grandparents) that print out every email since they like reading on paper, not a screen. And how about people printing out their digital photos? If the paperless office were taking hold, we'd be seeing a lot less printer sales, where the opposite is the case: it's expected every computer you buy, comes with a printer.
I actually think as computer technology takes greater hold and becomes more ubiquitous, we will see more waste and more environmental destruction as a result. This has more to do with the fact it's just getting cheaper and cheaper at a faster rate. People toss cell phones in the trash now. I think the only thing that will stop this process is for technology to be made with easy recycling in mind from the start. But I think it will get a lot worse before it gets better.
http://www.goldsmithgroup.com/servfacts.htm
f ew ork/cis/products/icsc/dtasht/_icsc00/icsc0052.htm
Florida Environmental Report states about Computers and Monitors:
"Out of 175 million computers comes a laundry list of toxins including 650 million pounds of lead, 987,000 pounds of cadmium and 231,000 pounds of mercury.
Each CRT (Cathode-Ray Tube) contains four to six pounds of lead. (New York Times, November 23, 2000)
According to University of Florida tests, color monitors contain enough lead to contaminate ground water if deposited in landfills. "Those monitors would fail the legal standards of leaching lead," said Susan Mooney of the EPA, Region 5 (Chicago).
These computers also contain 2 billion pounds of plastic. "
so thats like 1/4 pound of lead per PC on top of the 4 to 6 per monitor. so thats a lot of lead.
http://members.aol.com/Ramola15/funfacts.html
"Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year; about 680 pounds per person."
so lets say you throw your computer out every three years. thats about 18 pounds of lead versus 2000 pounds of paper over three years. imagine throwing your honda civic, made of paper, into the ground. then cover it with something like 1/5 a gallon of molten lead (crappy math, hey i think its within an order of magnitude).
which do you feel worse about? the honda civic sized paper ball or the fifth of lead?
public service announcement: i have a 10th grade math education
http://www.ilo.org/public/english/protection/sa
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
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..
Twenties Retirement
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.
Get your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape
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.
Well, this is beyond the means for your school, but I think there is a business opportunity for someone here in the offing.
The National Security Agency (NSA) instituted a program some years ago by which they decided to get some money and reuseability out of the obsolete pieces of equipment they were required to destroy (due to classification issues) rather than give to DRMO to be resold to the public.
The NSA has to destroy a lot of circuit boards and electronic devices like hard drives and they have to do so thoroughly. Many of these devices as we all know contain valuable precious and industrial metals like gold, platinum, and so forth. So, they built an industrial plant that could extract as much useful material as possible from the destroyed equipment, and they would resell that to the public for a profit. They also do this with the pulp that comes from the destruction of paper documents and such. What can't be reused is disposed of in accordance with environmental regulations.
This program has turned out to be so successful that the NSA actually turns a significant profit (to the tune of several million dollars a year) and sends this profit back into the Federal Treasury.
I am sure that this could become a viable business in the civilian world for some smart entrepreneurs out there.
I know this because Tyler knows this.
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!"?
Twenties Retirement
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
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.
Stuffing all the latest Microsoft bugfixes would be more than useful.
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/
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.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
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
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?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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 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.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
If I remember correctly, electronics use (including computers) has low environmental impact compared to things like driving an SUV or living in a big house. This is from the book:
o nI D=308
6 09 80281X/104-4760810-4413531?vi=glance
"The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists"
You can get it here:
http://www.ucsusa.org/publication.cfm?publicati
and read some reviews here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
I program, admin, and plot out incredibly complicated schemes to waste my time while maintaining the careful semblance of productivity. Since it's not feasible to carry around a 10mx3m messy white-board, I prefer using legal pads. If they came with wings, it would be a bonus. I fill them. I file them, I throw them (without wings they just go nuts!) and when things are really fun I jump up and down on them in a cathartic rage while shaking the walls with formless screams of primal fury. Face it, aside from dealing with the dioxin problems caused by the processing (and one wicked smell!) paper has an incredibly high return value.
-Go ahead, fold your laptop into a dart or a glider. Hey, just throw it. Please?
-Crayons, ink, watercolor, pencil, tempra, chalk all work well on paper, try it with a laptop, but don't insult us by calling it a "case mod". It would be interesting to hear a tape of the support call though. Be sure to put it on a M$ personal webserver directly on said laptop and link it to an "Ask slashdot" article. Thank you.
-One word....Origami!!
-Another victim....cursive/calligraphy. We will all write like doctors, dammit!
-Write and solve complex "anything" on a computer while you deny yourself the rich medium that lets you doodle, scribble, jot, or work on your limerics in the margins while still giving you the kind of dynamic outline capabilities of paper. My guess is that you'll suffer a kind of claustrophobia. I know I do. I can't even stand computer day-planners. They're a complete waste of time to everyone except the rigidly controlled. There's just too much chaos in my day-to-day, hour-to-hour world.
And comming soon..."Digital Ink"! It's short for "Another costly M$ Monopoly we will impale you on PC user--pay up and quit whining thieves!". Could you imagine having to purchase site licenses for a floor of tablet-pc's and then suffer the indignity of having to purchase "Refills"?!! (more primal screaming and breaking things)
There's also the cluelessness of computer use in the classroom. K12 Schools that want to present themsevles as being forward and progressive are actually just making the fat-cats fatter. What about all the infrastructure costs? You don't network for free with laptops...or anything. K12 should be about something other than the bored smart kids helping the bored kids fix their laptops or use M$ products...because after some buttmunch tweaks the registry you'd probably be lucky to have a character mapper or even notepad accessible on one of those things.
What about licensing fees for software?! Does "Ichman Highschool" suddenly transform into "The DELL-Ichman-Microsoft Campus" Screw the whole "highschool" thing, they're not _just_ a provider of k12 education.
"Students...Parents...Please take the scalpel provided and while holding your forearm over the bloodletting tray, gently press and slice with the tip, just enough to get a good stream of blood started..."
On the upside, it's certainly easier to catalog and archive every deviant word, every unpleasant thought, computer doodles and website deviltry and sell access to it to the highest bidder, like PINKERTON, or to a Corporate Human Enslavement department. I'm sure everyone here would just love to know that their employer would be reading about a crush they had, or what they did some weekend tweleve years ago when they foolishly submitted some journal assignment. Of course the alternative is to have really savvy kids with such an entrenched reflexive mendacity that they would never write anything personal. I've already seen this kind of behavior in colleges where nobody ever really writes what they're thinking except for the former home-coming queens and class valedictorians who truly want whirrled peas and work with children.
"Do k12 students really need access to computers at all for anything other than entertainment?" The answer is a resounding "No." Even NASA would prefer that they just "write up" experiments and then scan in just the illustratio
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
"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.
.
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. .
I'm going to make a very un-PC like statement and come out and say if I had a choice between a notebook and a notebook laptop, I'm taking the hardware each and every time. I mean... it's a friggin' laptop! C'mon! I would have killed for one when I was in school.
The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition storehouses a lot of this information, though you have to wade through a lot of fluff. You might start here.
I teach computer science/computer technology at a small college, and this has been my experience with the power point as well. I had to threaten that if I saw anything but the "six slides to a page" I would stop making the powerpoint available at all.
As for homework, I started requiring all homework be submitted electronically years ago. First on 3.5" diskettes, then on CD-R and now most is Email. For example, this past semester I taught a course in advanced C++. All assigments were emailed to me, I would compile the source code, test it, and then email it back with comments and the grade. Saves all sorts of paper and has a quicker turn around time for the students as well. In addition, I can make assignments due at a time when neither I nor the students would normally be at the school, such as midnight on a Sunday night.
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.
Speak before you think
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. . .
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Also, farmer/poet/essayist Wendell Berry wrote a short, widely ridiculed essay years back entitled "Why I am not Going to Buy a Computer". It contains interesting criteria for accepting new technological innovations. Google reveals an online version of the essay here. Its short and worth reading. You should really buy the whole excellent book: What Are People For?
> 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.
You might want to consider RSI problems. School furniture is usually not suited for working with laptops. In the Netherlands, regulations forbid employees from using a laptop more than two hours a day (that means that the employer is obliged to provide a docking station or PC). Recently, the Inspection has concluded that (college) student computer equipment should meet the same standards as personnel equipment. In short, if there are regulations about laptop use for employees, why shouldn't they apply to pupils? (And if that doesn't work, you can still frighten the parents.)
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!
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
I am amazed at how lazy people are. I have long ago stopped being upset at people not turning off their computers when they're not using them overnight or such. I understand it can be a lengthy process to "get back to where you were" when you turned it off....especially if you're a devleper like me.
But what about your stupid monitor? There it is, sucking away 200+ Watts of energy and generating heat in air conditioned offices in the summer. The effect of people regularly turning off their monitors overnight in this country would probably give us back about enough electricity to like a city of 500,000 people.
You figure the fuel not used and the wars not fought.