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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?"
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.
Twenties Retirement
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
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
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.
/. jabber and file under My Contribs to the Universe.
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
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.
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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. .