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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?"
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.
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
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.
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
Stuffing all the latest Microsoft bugfixes would be more than useful.
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!
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 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.
> 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.