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Manufacturing 1 PC Takes 1.8 Tons Of Raw Material
remy writes "Although most of it (1.5 metric tons) is water, a study from the United Nations University details the raw materials used in the manufacture of a PC and 17" CRT. That's an incredible environmental cost per PC, and a very strong argument for trying to leverage older equipment, not to mention upgrading rather than replacing."
that I haven't bought a monitor in seven years and have fished several out of the garbage. Using a KVM switch is helpful too.
Wow, now I don't have to feel bad about running the tap for a couple seconds before filling my glass....
I have this odd feeling that they are neglecting how much it would cost to make the second PC and monitor; how much of the material cost is simply overhead?
1.5 tons of water. But all of that gets reused eventually. I mean, it's not like it gets jettisoned into space, or converted into energy.
I mean I suppose things like fossil fuels get converted into useless byproducts, but most of the stuff would not be. This is accounting is beyond a little suspicious. I mean, how many tons of stuff does a person eat and then shit out in their lifetime. Probably a lot more then 1.8 tons.
And would upgrading really make that much of a difference? You upgrade a couple of times, then you need a new mobo, and after a while you need a new case to fit your new motherboard, and you practically have a new PC anyway. Its more like a gradual change to a new computer (combined with enough spare parts to build old machines) rather then large, discrete steps.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Do not appeal to save energy or water. Promote the integration of the hidden environmental costs into the framework of market economics for finding appropiate prices for water and energy!
-- Contradictions only exist in thought - not in reality.
For anyone in the Bay Area you might want to the check out the Alameda Computer Resource Center (ACCRC). They recycle just about anything electronic, but they also load up Linux on old computers and give them to schools, non-profits, and developing nations. Very cool organization. Located in Berkeley. www.accrc.org
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
From the article: ...Williams suggests redesigning network cards to allow the PC to go to sleep and then wake it should there be any important network traffic."
"Too many computers at companies are prevented from entering their standby mode by LAN traffic, which keeps them awake and consuming power even while they are not in use, he said.
Hasn't that already been done in the form of Wake-on-LAN?
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." -Albert Einstein
has a high environmental impact. I'm somewhat sure that it's at least 50 gallons of water to get one gallon of tap water.
Frylock: Do you know much water is used up every time you flush the toilet?
....wow. What a waste. (puts his hand on his head, pissed off that Frylock is bothering him) ....the poor children.
Carl: I give. What?
Frylock: Three....gallons....
Carl:
OK, so I opt to upgrade my computer instead of buying a new one (which is the only thing I've ever done in the last 20 years of PC use).
What parts shouldn't I upgrade in order to be "environmentally friendly"? I'm sure the case doesn't take a hellacious amout of natural resources. I mean, it's just bending metal. The power supply is relatively simple electronics.
So, my guess is that the biggest consumers of resources are going to be the hard drive, the memory, the processor, and the motherboard.
Which are things I upgrade. Regularly.
I think environmental conservation is an important idea, but it seems like "Upgrade! Don't replace!" just gives the manufacturers a good excuse to not explore less environmentally hostile manufacturing techniques.
Having said all that, the beauty of water is that when you use it, you get to use it again. Yay water cycle. Makes planet work good.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Sure they may use the same amount of resources to make, but seeing as they are typically used 2 - 3 times as long, wouldn't they be a net improvement on a pc ?
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
The advertisement for the article is pushing an overpriced IBM "e-server".
The study is, of course, published on dead trees.
Oh, the irony.
So yeah, recycling really is a good idea.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Linux can be used as a means to protect our environment, by using its features to save power or paper, since it doesn't require big hardware it may be used with old computers to make their life cycle longer, games may be used in environmental education and software is available to simulate ecological processes. See a detailed description of this means in the Ecology-HOWTO.
As the article notes, fabrication of IC's is very resource intensive. So, even if I can replace my graphics card, CPU and RAM without upgrading the rest of my machine, the environmental savings may not be as great as the article suggests.
i got an eeny weeny 14" CRT display.. :d
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
/me waits for all of the comments about the newish small form factor PCs...
Remove the 1.5 tons of water and you have 300 kg of other material. The average wheight of a PC is much less than that. So the question is where does the matter go? Or in other words: I can't imagine that a PC manufacturer that is doing lets say 1 million PC per year is moving 300000 tons of material through its factory. That would be 1000 tons every day, just imagine the number of trucks you need to supply that mass.
The electricty costs of using a PC
Damn,
ISP costs
Cost of time spent reading Slashdot posts
Sure adds up, doesnt it?
In some states it's illegal to throw a PC or monitor into the garbage. I know in the county I live in there is a fine for dumping computer equipment because of the heavy metals and other hazmats involved, but I've never heard of anyone being arrested or fined or anything for it. There are companies that specialize in proper disposal, but of course it costs you money.
So anyway, even if natural resources don't mean shit to you and you don't want to sound like some save-the-world-with-idealism, tree-hugging liberal, it's a good idea to recycle machines for reasons other than politics. Aside from dumping laws, there is always someone you know that could use an older machine. Or you can donate it to the VOA or Goodwill for a tax credit.
-JemI know that an American ton contains only 2000 pounds, as opposed to a British ton which contains 2240 pounds; and that a British pound is approximately 454 grammes. What I want to know is this. Is an American pound the same as a British poung (454g.) and thus an American ton is less than a British ton? Or is an American ton the same weight as a British ton (approximately a megagramme) and thus an American pound weighs more than a British pound?
What about Canada? Or are they too sensible to piss aboot with obsolete units?
In other news:
80% of the raw material used to manufacture a PC is pure water! Water that can be recycled! Compare this to the manufacturing of a car, where 20% is water, you got yourself a very enviromentally friendly piece of equipment.
Tree huggers unite! Buy a PC and save the environment.
In conclusion, numbers and statistics are in the eye of the beholder.
Underholdning.info
I'm curious about some of the numbers in the article. It said 240 kg (109 lb) of fossil fuels (~18 gallons assuming gasoline), 22 kg of chemicals (10 lb), and 1,500 kg (680 lb) of water (~395 gallons I think) are used to make a single PC and 17" monitor.
OK, how do they arrive at those numbers? It seems like a staggering waste PER PC/MONITOR.
Can anyone sufficiently explain (or debunk) these numbers? Do these numbers include all the fossil fuels used to heat/cool the work environment? Include the admin part of the work? Include water used in toilets and for drinking?
If yes, what would the consumption rate be if no PCs were built? If no, does that mean these numbers are not as thorough as they'd have us believe, and the actual number is higher? Of course, if these are not that accurate already, what basis is there to believe the numbers they have now?
I'd really like to see more details on how these numbers were determined.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Considering 1.5 tonnes of this material is water, it's hardly a terrible waste.
Patriotism - the last resort of scoundrels.
I will waste as much as I want by buying new computers and throwing the old ones away! Try and stop me, suckers!
A blog like any other.
For me, it is a dilema. Between an upgrade, you get a more efficient hardware at similar price-energy ratio, thus more energy "friendly".
But with these, you get headache junking old hardware, and suffocate our habitat.
Consider this option, Computers for Africa
A similar report on BBC, Computers 'must become greener
Hey, that's my password you are typing
Donation of older systems
Businesses really do not need to upgrade as often as they do Is there really that much functionality to the officeworker of an athlon FX 64 bit machine compared to a P200? I mean Word perfect and Lotus 1,2,3 both worked great on mine under OS/2 2.1 Now I am talking for business purposes hear not gaming or rendering or scientific maches servers etc. Just your typical iffice users 8-5 kind of thing
Move more and more to clustered computing. Need a render farm after hours? Use the machines already in place. When I worked for a design firm we had a render farm but I would use the other network machines after hours to speed things up considerably and it meant I didn't have to upgrade so rapidly.
Boot diskless terminals (kind of like the reverse of the previous comment) another 10 users may equal a change in processor and memmory and the addition of a new drive no need to build an entire system for each one.
What other responsible actions can we think of to turn the tide? I know the computer manufacturers certainly dont want to see it happen but the whole situation has become quite silly.
BTW just because of this topic I am posting from my 7350 dual 180Mhz 604e server
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
The car manufacturing cost in raw materials a lot more (steel only make more then 800 kg ). I think it's a lot more reasonable to ask people use old cars, instead of using old PC.
The BBC is running a report from one of the UKs regional recycling centers
"It says a PC uses more than ten times its weight in fossil fuels and chemicals to manufacture."
"One of the ways of extending the life of a computer is to make it more easy to upgrade, rather than the current trend constantly replacing them for a better model as soon new versions become available."
Businesses need fast computers so the office workers can play games, of course.
PC, and a very strong argument for trying to leverage older equipment
/. , some people here still keep their houses warm with the idle drone of their VAX clusters ;)
This is
Seriously, I still have my 386sx kicking around. All it has is DOS 5.0 and old games, but hey, I'm using it.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
I'm curious as to how this compares to the environmental cost of a car... I'm sure I'm not the only one who has several PCs, but no car at all...
lone, dfx.
How many "tons" of water do I use to shower? And I do that everyday. I certainly don't buy a computer everyday, however. You may as well consider the air and food consumed by the factory workers if you are forced to follow the causal trail so far to get the desired dramatic number. How many fossil fuels are used to till the fields that grow the crops that feed the workers that make the computers? Clearly, this is an ecological disaster. Our only option is to start killing people, or at least keep them from being born. That is where this trail of logic will eventually lead you.
Get real. Computers are plastic, silicon, metal. There is no f'ing way that it takes 1.8 TONS of materials to churn out your average pc. 1.8 Tons is the total average weight of a midsize car! Cars have computers in them too! So the computer in the car, combined with the naviation/gps systems, dvd player and other goodies, AND the car itself must by the laws of this article consumed the GDP of Haiti to be produced! :)
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
The down side of it is that since it isn't fluoridated , my kids definetely had more cavities (seven among three kids) than my brothers kids (none!! among three), who have fluoridated water, so I have to admit that "city" water does have a few advantages. My bro and my Mom, however, also prefer the way our water tastes (yes!), so every week I drop off a few gallons for them to drink "right out of the ground!"
Oh, yeah, I live in New Jersey, about 30 minutes from NYC, up in the hills. It's tested and it's VERY clean - no PCB's/organics/heavy metals, etc so hold your horses before making the stupid Jersey jokes. Newark airport and the Turnpike is not what Jersey is all about
..........FULL STOP.
He directed me to toss them in with all the other garbage, rather than doing his job and putting them in the hazardous materials building.
I refused, but it makes me cringe to know that that behavior is probably being repeated a couple of times a day, in hundreds of locations.
I still have these batteries, but I'm waiting until the boss is there, and going to get them put away correctly and responsibly. It was an old guy who didn't want to help me out - I assume he still thinks asbestos makes a great dust mask.
Yes, I am a dirty hippy sometimes.
Isn't it time we start thinking for ourselves when dealing with environmental claims?
Sometimes environmental claims are exaggerated or simply untrue. Consider that while you're still allowed to own a computer.
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Diction ary&va=leverage
Main Entry: 2leverage
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): -aged; -aging
: to provide (as a corporation) or supplement (as money) with leverage; also : to enhance as if by supplying with financial leverage
I've not bought a PC from them yet, but I like the look of Hoojum. They certainly seem to be the most ethical manufacturer I've come across. Does anyone else know of any companies that do similar things?
how much raw materials is needed to produce "ecological" stuff (both mechanical and food).
Does anyone else have the sneaking suspicion that they're including the entire chain of manufacture and resources used in those numbers? Like, the water used to mine the ores to make the steel, which is made with x ammount of electricity, which is in turn produced by x ammount of fossil fuels, to be bent into the case frame, etc.?
I'm all for reduce, reuse, recycle... but I'd rather that other proponents of it don't mislead in order to promote the three R's. (Not to make accusations, of course....)
I'd also like to see their numbers on LCD screens.
~UP
Eat the Path.
Admittedly, PC hardware isn't directly affected by the withdrawal of support, because the open standard means you can swap failed bits out. However, when MS stop supporting NT or Office 97 you're shafted, because you can't run the replacement on that hardware without spending almost as much as a new box would cost. So they get you in the end.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Can't remember the brand of cigarette, but their ads always featured some long legged model with the tagline "We've come a long way baby"
Using SSH and console is ok, when I just have to pop in really quick to edit some conf file, or tail -f some log. %80 of the time i'm doing this, it's pertaining to some clients web site i'm working on.
Guess what though? Do I fire up lynx to view my changes? Hell no! I use mozilla or IE, or some other html renderer. Do I create graphics or video from the console too? Hell no, I use some graphic program, with some nice gui, and pretty little icons everywhere BECAUSE I LIKE IT!!!!
Not only do I like it for that kind of work, I like it FAST! The faster the better!
Does it look like I care about leveraging old hardware for modern content? (shameless plug)
What I do use old equipment for is an ipcop firewall. I also use it to frankenstien together stepper motor interfaces because it IS old and I don't give a crap if it catches on fire because I wired something the wrong way.
Here's the whole wrapup to my post, i.e. the point. I read slashdot everyday, I build mosix clusters using plumpOS (couldn't remember the link sorry) My garage is filled from top to bottom with old computer crap because I know i'm not average joe sixpack user, and I will find a purpose for it even if it's just for research or fun. Average joe sixpack doesn't care about these things, he just wants his little clickety click icons to open up faster, or his OS to load quicker, or his games to run better.
And I sympathize with him %100. Thanks Joe sixpack for not taking the time to learn what I do, because I'm that car that stops outside your house to load up that PC you put out with your trash.
In terms of weight, the total amount of materials used is about equal to that of a mid-size car.
Doesn't this just show that car prices are inflated?
According to the article we need to upgrade less often, it says buying a new PC every 2-3 years is too much strain on the environment.
Uh-oh. Aside from the case I usually change everything in my computer every 6 months! If I'd followed this advice and still had my PC from 4 years ago I'd be trying to play Half Life 2 and Doom 3 on a P2 266 and Riva TNT this summer. Scary.
I can't see many people following this advice unfortunately.
That first paragraph is a little misleading. The author makes it sound like the material cost to produce a PC is the same as it is to build a car. He's actually comparing the raw materials needed for a PC to the final weight of a car. Confused me for a while.
While monitors have a somewhat limited lifespan... I think it would be more likely to encourage users to keep their monitors unless their current one is inadaquate. I'm on an old Sony 20se for example, one of my favorites, older but still pretty damn good. I know of many people who just get new monitors with their new pcs just because it doesn't cost all that much when their older monitor will do the trick.
At least in America, there has not really been a compelling reason to upgrade TV sets more then once a decade, unless the old set broke. Not that we didn't get new spiffy TVs with AV inputs, fancy svideo inputs, remote controls, or the new HDTVs with 3 inputs
Sadly, any thrift store that I frequent will not accept a monitor as a donation, or a TV set for that matter. It makes me sad as even a 14inch monitor for $20 = one step closer to a PC for some.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Yeah I was gonna make the same general point. Local or state or federal ordinances may make the disposal of certain items in certain fashions illegal.
Where the system breaks down is at the point where the disposal actually takes place.
There are many things that are not supposed to be placed in the garbage stream where I live, TVs being one of them. I can tell you that the guys who pick stuff up and toss it on the truck just don't give a damn. If they can lift it and it fits in the truck then it goes in the truck. Period.
Thats a bit of water to create a computer, but as we know, creation is but a small cost of running something. How much water is used to power said computer? (ok, we use hydro for most of our power in NZ). I'll bet that far more resources are used to keep them running than to create them in the first place...
Just to put these numbers in perspective:
Running the PC and monitor (using lets say 500W) for a year during office hours (2000 hours) would consume 1000kWh. A typical power station would produce 1000kg of CO2 to generate that. Leaving the PC on all the time (8760 hours) would produce 4380kg CO2 per year.
The true cost of any product is the cost MINUS the benefit.
Upgrading something, like a proc, only to find out the MoBo fails after 2 months is NOT cost effective.
Why do people not question real insanities like, oh, trading money orso. Or Litigious Bastardry. Or money spend to "protect Intellectual Property". Things that cost huge effords, with no added value, but we pay for anyway.
People say, "look a new industry" and point to McAfee AntiVirus. I can only shake my head, and upgrade.
For the sysadmins: Try calculating the amount of time YOU spend, on protecting Other People's IP.
"/Dread"
It's not a matter of argument, it's a matter of that the earth has finate resources, and by wasting them you're literally killing the future generation. So go on about how Joe Sixpack needs his SUV/4WD car and new computer every 20 months, you or your children may literally end up dying of starvation in your old age as a result. You can scorn environmental concern as being some paranoid left-wing plot, but however you perceive it or what social groups you associate it with, it does not change the cold hard reality that a CPU actually cuts a slice of materials of a limited pie.
Consider this: when I need more PC power, I could replace part of the machine (say: motherboard, cpu, memory, disk drive) or I could buy a new system.
When replacing only part, I could say that I saved the environment by not replacing everything. But at the same time, I have discarded part of a system, useless to everyone but a few hobbyists.
When I would have bought a new system, I would have left one complete machine that could be useful to someone else. I could sell it, donate it to a school project, or whatever. It could probably run a few more years before it is useless to anyone.
So, instead of discarding useless parts into the environment, I actually only damaged the economy (because the one who gets my old machine does not need to buy a new one). That does not seem to be such a big deal.
In the end we end up with a couple of pounds of computer, the rest did not vanish into thin air. So it is not like we used up 1.5 tons of matter that will for ever be lost because we wanted a computer or an SUV.
You can also do a lot with a simple memory upgrade.
This is after all the business market. Not the home user market. For office use a dual P3 is even better (with the right modern OS) then a single P4. No more lag while your wordproccessor starts up.
With such an upgrade you just doubled the life of the Mobo, memory, cpu, HD, expansion cards, cables and monitor. 50% reduction in waste. Not bad eh?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
For more references about this United Nations University study, here is one useful and informative links: UN study shows environmental consequences from ongoing boom in personal computer sales. You can look at the flyer of the study (PDF format, 2 pages, 181 KB). Finally, you can visit this page to discover the contents of the book, "Computers and the Environment: Understanding and Managing their impacts." You can even order it for $35 or 32. On a similar subject, you also can read Why Do We Need 'Greener' Computers which tals about all the waste of electricity caused by the inefficiencies of our computers after they're built. And on yet another similar subject, you can read 4 Tons of Plants per Mile to Ride your Car.
"Bay Area" my big toe.
Here in Luxembourg, we have non-profit organization to handle recycling (pick-up of recyclable items, such as glass, cardboard, certains kinds of plastic bottles and milk cartons). Their name is Valorlux. A couple of weeks ago, I needed to look up the date of their next pick-up, and was stumped by their flash-only website.
I sent them a mail about it, and got the following reply:
Subject: L'internet n'est pas...
Cher Monsieur Xxxxx,
La page 'macromedia' qui apparait est en fait une passerelle qui vous permet
de telecharger un logiciel
du nom de 'Flash 6' ce dernier etant absolument necessaire pour naviguer
dans le site VALORLUX sans probleme.
VALORLUX a choisi d'offrit ce logiciel et son telechargement entierement
gratuitement afin de permettre a toutes les personnes n'ayant pas ce systeme
de pouvoir visiter notre site.
Ce ne sont absolument pas des publicites pour des societes americaines - ni
autres - simplement des outils
facilitant l'acces au site.
Si vous n'avez pas reussi a le telecharger c'est probablement que votre
ordinateur n'est soit pas assez
puissant, soit un peu trop 'age' pour utiliser ces produits, nous en sommes
absolument desoles.
Nous vous prions de croire en nos salutations les meilleures.
VALORLUX Asbl
Muriel Fedele
Responsable de la Communication
BP 26
L-3205 LEUDELANGE
The last sentence, in English: If you have not succeeded in downloading it [the Flash plugin], it is likely that your computer is either not powerful enough, or a little bit too "old" for using these products, and we are absolutely sorry about this.
Yes, and in order to resolve this issue, I'm supposed to buy a new one, throw the old one into the trash, and waste precious 1.8 tons of raw materials. Way to go, Valorlux!
Say no to software patents.
Usually during manufacturing they use clean drinkable water wich emerges from the other end un-drinkable. There are systems in wich the cycle is closed or in wich polution does not take place but these are rare and expensive. Polluted water is in fact a useless byproduct. Unfit for drinking (for obvious reasons) unfit for cooling (even drinking water isn't clean enough for that) and unfit for production unless your a Pepsi fan.
But you can filter water to become drinkable can't you? Well yes. To a certain degree and at a cost. So if factory X takes water from a river and then dumps it back with pollution then it is taking Y amount of drinkable water from everyone down stream.
So this is probably the figure they are talking about. No water is not in itself in any danger of running out. We can always build more refining installations. But these in turn too cause pollution (how do you think they are powered) wich then you will have to clean up. Unless you like your drink with heavy metals?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
... takes 0.018 grams of brains.
Somebody needs to make the component prices cheaper compared to the replacement cost.
I mean if you want to upgrade gfx,cpu,ram & motherboard chances are it is almost at the same price of buying a complete replacement PC
WTF does the verb leverage mean? Suddenly I'm seeing and hearing it everywhere and I don't understand. I have a feeling it has replaced "facilitate" as a word misused by idiots who want to say "use" but sound more intelligent and important people around them.
use -> utilize -> facilitate -> leverage
Am I right?
"I'm sure the case doesn't take a hellacious amout of natural resources. I mean, it's just bending metal. The power supply is relatively simple electronics."
Actually, I think that the UN study is a bit misleading. It's not the water or chemicals only. For example mining ore for all metallic parts for a computer case (iron, aluminum) or for components (silicon, tin, gold, etc.) is also a serious environment hasard. For example gold mining industry is using mercury for separating gold from ore. Also large-scale iron mining has (apart from being an aesthetic disaster) a huge impact on environment.
So, when you're upgrading your PC, was it just a case or a motherboard, the environmental effects will be significant, one way or the other.
Microsoft+Intel+BigHugeGames made my two year old PC look like serious junk... I think they ought to be made to take the environmental-guilt on their shoulders...
The thoughtless and unceasing consumption of material goods is vital to the economic growth of capitalist societies. We can't actually be advocating environmental considerations now--after all, that would reduce the efficiency at which we would continue to funnel wealth out of the middle and lower classes.
From here http://symptom.mit.edu/mt/tso2.htm
" Another cause for concern is the large quantity of water used. Manufacturing a computer involves using large amounts of water to rinse off the components. Estimates say that repeatedly rinsing printed circuit boards requires 33,000 liters of water per computer and more than 12,000 liters for semiconductors (Computers and Society, p7). This water cannot be recycled because of the chemical contamination from solvent residue, and thus must be stored. However, as with any chemical storage, as mentioned above, there exists some risk of leakage. When leakage occurs, the polluted water can go into the soil and cause the drinking water in the area to become poisoned."
So before you all keep ranting on about the reusability of water and you dont have to catr because you are American and SOOOO much better than the half of the world who need that water to keep their children alive, just check your facts.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
If consistent environmentalists had their way and could press a button that would kill mankind while leaving the rest of the world untouched, is there any doubt they would do so? It is painfully obvious that technology is an unconditional requirement for the continued existence of at least 90% of mankind today. There is not a single environmental cause that cannot be traced back to a motive that involves the undercutting and destruction of _anything_ required by human beings to survive and flourish. They will tout an "alternative" only as long as it remains impractical; when it ends up actually benefitting humanity, they will attack it (e.g. now: wind power.) The solution is to STOP supporting the environmentalist religion and to stop feeling guilt about creating and supporting technological progress.
I don't want to pay these people $35 to buy a copy of their report, nor do I have time to read the whole thing. But I suspect that anyone who does take the time will find faults with the stated conclusions. They aren't necessarily lying -- it's just that the nature of the topic is complex and therefore subject to multiple interpretations.
Due to the interconnected nature of the economy, I don't think that it is meaningful to just say that it takes a certain amount of raw materials to manufacture a computer. For example, does the figure include the water that the cow drank that went into the hamburger that the trucker ate while delivering the VGA connectors? It also takes a ridiculous amount of water to produce a little bit of beef, you know. Perhaps that was a bit far-fetched, but you can see how there could be lots of discretion in deciding what to include or exclude in the tally.
One way to see if their methodology is fair is to compare the environmental impact of producing computers with that of other products. Here I sense that between the UN University and InfoWorld, someone is being sloppy / misleading / sensationalistic.
I think that may be a bit unfair to compare the materials used to produce a PC and a car against their respective final weights. The goal of electronics is to fit as much complexity as possible into ever shrinking products. The goal of car manufacturers is to make their cars as roomy and as lightweight as practical. Why don't they celebrate the fact that a solar-powered calculator can compute what it used to take an ENIAC to compute? In that light, we're already making tremendous environmental progress.
What does it mean to say that water is used? If you take the water and mix it with some nasty chemicals, then it's polluted. If you use it to wash some dirt off of something, it's dirty but easily returnable to the environment. If you use it to carry away heat in a sealed heat exchanger, it remains perfectly clean but might make some fish unhappy when you return it to the river at a slightly higher temperature. If you took it from the Seattle, it's no big deal; if you took it from Ethiopia, it's a crime against humanity. How much of the 1500 kg of water in a PC is "used" in each way?
Anyway, I don't doubt that PC manufacturing has some significant environmental impact, and that we should find ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle. But I'm sure that anyone who wants to write a report with an opposite viewpoint could easily do so. Just be aware that the authors have an interest in picking the comparisons that generate the maximum shock value.
on how many tons of dirt it takes to make a burrito.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Considering that they have rejected two of my (sole)story contributions, you'd think that they'd find more earthshaking/non-silly stories than I submitted.
I use 22kgs of fossil fuel almost every three weeks to commute to my place of work, here in India. People in developed countries burn lot more. Now, according to their arguement do we stop using our cars?
The best planning can be done after the project completes.
Simply bending metal is I am afraid like saying meat comes from the supermarket. Last time I checked there where no metal sheet mines. It either has to be taken from ore wich is a gigantic process involving insane amounts of rock being boiled to extract tiny amounts of metal or recovered from scrap iron. Even the later still requires a lot of work to sort it all out (I am not even going to mention the costs of removing plastics and paint from the scrap iron) melt it down and get it into nice metal sheets for bending.
Still the case is probably the least wastefull. but also the least likely to be replaced in an upgrade. Why after all. For several generations of PC's it has been ATX motherboards so one size fits all. Power supply? Unless it is broken again why upgrade?
No the biggest offender is the MOBO. Countless different materials wich are difficult to recover and only yielding tiny amounts. Scrap the case and you got a few kilos of metal. Scrap a mother board and you are talking a few grams of sellable stuff. You can get paid for a truckload of cases, you will have to pay someone to scrap the mobos.
Mobo is a bastard for other reasons as well. The case can be used over multiple generations and so can stuff like the monitors and HD's. But with each new CPU generation you need a new MOBO.
Your last comment is so wrong that I think you really are someone who thinks meat comes from a supermarket?
Water that has been used can be used again? Not unless your into watersports.
Polluted water does not magically clean itself. Sure water polluted by going through humans and animals gets cleaned eventually after several years going throught the natural cycle. Same is not true for industrial polluted water. Heavy metals have a tendency to stick around in the water supply.
Yes water can be recycled but if you are an industry then you need to do it yourselve and this costs money. A lot of it. Best would be if factories used a closed cycle. However most do not and so the water is very much wasted. Unless you enjoy drinking water with the extra tang of lead and mercury.
Drinkable water is a resource that renews itself at a certain rate. Sadly we humans seem very capable of consuming it a greater rate. Luckily we are also capable of adding to the renewal process but this seems to only happen when people or companies are ordered at pain of fines to do this.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Americans say the darndest things :)
Proof? Total your car and total your pc and see for wich you still can get money. You will have to pay someone to take the PC of your hands but the car still fetches a few hundred from a scrap merchant.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...requires at least 240 kilograms of fossil fuels, 22 kilograms of chemicals and 1,500 kilograms of water.
So, 1500Kg's is water... How do you use water such that it doesn't go back into circulation?
I mean, are they keeping the water in the computers or blasting it off into space after using it?
Resonably, the water is put back where it came from after being used and cleaned, so really it requires 300Kg's of raw material to produce a PC.
monitor requires at least 240 kilograms of fossil fuels
Monitors run on petrol?
I'd like to know how they got these figures. I mean, they didn't do something retarded like checking how much energy is used to produce a monitor, checking how much petrol would be required to produce that energy and then just using that figure?
Depending on where you are, the energy could be coming from water/wind/sun, or some other enviromentally friendly source.
I don't doubt for a second that PC's are unfriendly to the enviroment, and we should try to recycle... but 1800Kgs, when 1500 of it is water.. c'mon...
Sure I could say that all the resources needed for making 1 pc is:
and in way I would be right. But only to people who would believe this stuff is delivered by little daemons in the middle of the night.
So the figures are the costs in raw materials used in the complete production process of a pc. This is btw not enviromentalist. It is economics. Only by knowing what it costs to produce something can you determine its worth and thereby the minimum selling price.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
hey want some porn ? it's here : sexe par cb and sexe cb. Suck it all !
the billions of barrels of beer being turned to 'waste' each year round the world. Where's your bleeding heart for that..
What parts shouldn't I upgrade in order to be "environmentally friendly"? I'm sure the case doesn't take a hellacious amout of natural resources. I mean, it's just bending metal.
If you have an aluminum case, I wouldn't be so sure. Refining aluminum costs quite a lot of energy.
It's stupid to believe that this thing is accurate. PC makers would lose thoudands of dollars on every PC they sold if we were to believe these numbers.
Absolute rubish.
The sad thing is that you won't save all of these resources by not purchasing that computer. Sure, the first order effect will be that one less computer is manufactured. However, the second order effects in a market economy will be:
1. Less demand for the resources in question
2. A drop in the price of the resources in question
3. As a result of cheaper resources: More demand for the resources for other uses
There will also be second order effects in terms of your own behavior, depending on what you get instead of the monitor. If you get a digital camera instead, the environment may be no better off (or even worse). If you, on the other hand, spend it for a massage, a restaurant dinner or a nice painting, then the environment will still remain grateful.
In the end, global resource consumption will reflect the aggregated preferences of us consumers in terms of resource-hungry vs. resource economical products and services.
Well, apparently I need to upgrade my iBook too, because really, I need to install crappy flash addons just to know when they fetch my recycable trash. *sigh*.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
It's hard not to upgrade when commercial software (which, yes, most people still) gravitates towards being bloated and resource-inefficient, when hardware companies tout their new products as the "Next Great Thing", when Joe and Jane Bloggs users want to upgrade because they think that it'll make their computer experience less crash-worthy and more fantastic...
And all these companies who depend on hardware upgrades for incoming cashflow still need to stay in the black. So I don't think a computer recycling-culture is going to develop any time soon, until the alternatives become a little more well known.
I'm running my 1999 system until it breaks or I REALLY must get into video editing.
Even though it's an old sub-1GHz proc., it still has tens of GB of free diskspace, can burn CD and still does what I need (I don't game - my wrists are shot from too much keyboard doom and quake).
When I need to upgrade there will be practically nothing worth keeping. I'll need a new mobo for USB2 and Firewire, a new video card... I'll probably want a better sound card... I'll finally join the DVD age (chuck away the CD drive), the floppy drive can go in the trash (OK, the junk pile in the loft). I'd want a quieter case/PSU in a smaller form, so just about the only things to keep are the keyboard&mouse, and my 17" CRT that I'm comfortable with.
When/if this happens, probably a year or two at most, what possible use is my old system, considering I'd transplant the hard drive? It'll be landfill.
Because you mucked up your proxy server settings?
So the raw materials are being consumed not in one factory, but in literally hundreds of different factories around the globe. If you look inside your PC, you'll see a lot of different companies' names on those chips, from a lot of different countries.
Only costs the ability to find internet access and remembering /.'s URL.
Fuck the Moderators
Fuck W Bush
Fuck Windows
Fuck Spam
Fuck Lawyers
FUCK YOU!
I wonder what the breakdown on monitor vs. CPU was. I'll bet the CRT was more than half. It would be interesting to see the numbers with a flat panel monitor substituted.
I doubt I'll be buying more CRTs. They're heavier, emit more heat and take up more desk space. Now that flat panel monitors are cheaper, I'm more inclined to get one.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
An Athlon 1.1GHz machine that I built for grad school 5 years ago... still does my email, web surfing, word processing, and everything else I need to do just fine. All I've had to do is add more RAM to keep up with bloatware, a second hard disk to handle my growing CD collection, and a new CD burner when the 8X burner that came in it died.
People don't realize that 99.999% of the time, they don't NEED a new PC. Simply adding more RAM and/or reinstalling Windows is all they need to do to get another year or three out of their PC. It's too bad they never realize that switching to linux will make their PC last forever.
"Although most of it (1.5 metric tons) is water"
.. but how many materials are required for just a standard air-cooled puter without the l33t glow-in-the=dark watercooling unit ?
Fair enough
Seriously though, the UN is full of crap sometimes. Sure, a pile of water gets consumed, but what becomes of that water ? Ill bet a lot it returns to the atmosphere as vapour, rises, condenses, and then forms rain drops eventually. Its not like the individual Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms get totally and irrevocably anihilliated in the production process.
I read somewhere else that rice is a shocker for water consumption - something like a hundred million billion litres of water are consumed just to produce a single grain of rice ! In comparison, you could build a million billion computers for each grain of rice produced, or some such rubbish.
A typical adult will require two litres of water a day to remain healthy. That amount is recommended by survivalist guide both for outdoors and natural disasters.
Florida state has a web calculator for you to work out your total water consumption:
There's another one by South Central Texas Regional Water Planning Group
What parts shouldn't I upgrade in order to be "environmentally friendly"?
Well with 1.5 tons of water "used" already you should really steer clear of any kind of water cooling.
In addition, you could always replace whatever you sit on with an exercise bike with a dynamo attached to the wheel. :)
Want to overclock? Just pedal faster
yep... now u know how valuable ur PC is?.. DO NOT waste it by installing WINDOWS...
fifteen jugglers, five believers
WTF? Did you even read what you wrote?
/.ers pretending they're all oh, so different from "Joe Sixpack"... Guess what? There are a million /.ers (and geeks in general) that are DIFFERENT JUST LIKE YOU. Get over it. And no one gives a shit about your life story -- just get to the fuckin' point and STFU.
:-(
And I'm fuckin' sick and tired of cookie-cutter
That's right, I didn't sleep at all tonight
This is peanuts compared to the amounts of energy and water used to produce your daily intake of food. Not to mention soil erosion. This is especially true for meat-based diets.
The brand is "Virginia Slims"
t ml t ml
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-- Make software not war
Lets go back to assembly language, then our CPUs will last a LOT longer.
Plus Java would be killed off( which is a perk ).
I conserve water by drinking sodas
It costs something like 10,000 litres of water per kilogram of cotton.
Or ~1000 litres per kilogram of beef.
Clearly, we should all be eating and wearing monitors.
I think you're absolutely right.
How about using the expected useful life of the goods as a measure of utility?
Then a PC, with an expected useful life of say 3 years (given the pace of software bloat), would be responsible for approximately 80kg/year of fossil fuel depletion.
A saloon car would have to have an expected useful life of around 12 years to justify its production costs in terms of fossil fuels, and a H2 Hummer would have to last some 50 years.
Now I'm no expert, but I can't see a Hummer lasting as long as a Landrover - hell, if most of them aren't in the scrapyard inside 10 years, I'll eat my hat collection.
Now that isn't to say that throwing away 80kg of fossil fuels per year for each PC manufactured is a good thing, but it does put things in a little better perspective.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
... the environmentalists win!
What I find amusing is that they felt it necessary to mention that they are not endorsing an American company. Assuming this was a boilerplate message (which it certainly appears to be), that would indicate more people are worried about requiring technology from an American firm than making the website universally accessible.
Perhaps because after you buy their product, they no longer own it?
It is more complicated than that. What he is trying to say is that maybe if manufacturers were responsible for their product after they sell it perhaps they would take more care to be less wasteful about packaging and design their products in a way that makes it less of a headache to dispose of them. Remember that disposal of toxic and other difficult to dispose of waste comes out of your taxes so one would think it is in your interest to keep waste disposal costs low. Making manufacturers partly responsible for the disposal of their products may not be an optimal solution but unfortunately the only thing that seems to motivate the companies to be less wasteful is to make sure that their profits are tied to their compliance to enviromental and efficiency standards.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
United Nations has a university? That seems odd.
By far, the majority of material used in
regulated industry is reused internaly
or recycled elsewhere, including most
chemicals.
So I use 200 gallons of water to make
a particular part in my C$C machine.
That water is filtered and reused for
the next part, or during the manufacture
of that 1st part.
If I'm making a 2lb aluminum bracket,
I might have to start with a 10 lb piece
or larger of stock. I end up with 8 lbs
of scrap, right?
Any water I 'use' is lost to evaporation,
and the lost material from shavings is
shipped off for scrap and made into a
new piece of stock.
Quoting these 'material costs' or
'environmental costs' as they are impies
that the excess material is not reused,
but is instead just shipped off and put
into a landfill or the ocean.
Bleh.
-Dirk R.
We have a septic system(like much of the country does), so the water goes back into the ground
..........FULL STOP.
But, they assume that the water , once used, is out of the loop for ever. Nonsense. A pass through the waste treatment plants, a little sunshine and it's rain again.
The sky is falling, the sky is falling!!! NOT! They aught to get a life and stop crusading. Idealism doesn't replace facts.
Actually water is quite expensive, in terms of conditioning. But just passing thru the pipe is what this damn report is talking about- I can tell you about processes I've done where the byproducts are BURNED. You want to talk about waste? Thats wasteful. When I tried to implement changes that would recycle and make it easier to recover the fossil fuel solvents, I had it nixed because of the environmental paperwork for the government.
So water consumption is a 'bad' thing? Not in my book.
This is a UN inspired rationale to PREVENT poor countries from investing in compute technology. Clearly the UN 'university' would prefer that all that economic development shift back to rich countries, 'where it belongs' instead of consuming precious natural resources otherwise critical for homeless urchins, women chained to power looms and puppies.
This is all a testament to how disposable our society has become.
They could make OS upgrades improve performance on the same equipment, but that doesn't drive the new disposable economy. OTOH it creates more markets for hackers to repurpose old equipment.
Back in the days, programmers actually were intimate with the hardware upon which they developed applications. Now they're 10 levels removed, with each level including an ever-increasing appetite for resources.
And we wonder why nothing works well anymore? We wonder why 30 years ago we could put a man on the moon, yet our "more innovative" technology doesn't work nearly as well?
I for one have made a conscious effort to resist the temptation of purchasing more "stuff". I am not going to pick up the latest-and-greatest gadget, only to realize that its firmware can't be updated and a newer model will come out in a month with more functionality. I'm not buying any more Sony digital cameras that have crippled jpeg compression so as to not compete with higher-end units that cost the same to manufacture. I'm not purchasing an egg peeling machine when I can do it with my hands just as well. I'm not going to purchase a game that requires me to upgrade a perfectly good video adapter.
I've noticed this trend to manufacture obsolescence in so many products it's starting to get ridiculous. Rubbermaid comes out with a new line of plastic storage tubs, but their shape isn't compatible with the previous line so they won't stack neatly on top of their older model storage boxes. It's just crazy.
So will the UN make a pledge not to upgrade any of its computers for the next ten years, or do they just want for me to make that pledge?
Ha, ha! Nobody ever says Italy.
except if a person is chugging along fine on a 1.5 Ghz machine and is being forced to upgrade to a faster machine (Corp. Policy or something else) than more materials and energy is consumed for little gain.
i on /. doesn't like odd links)
This goes out the window with reliance on processor intensive tasks. In those situations the energy savings from speed overtake the decreased energy usage at a lower speed. (Palimocore to a Barton core on the Athlon would be such an example)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_power_consumpt
(sorry for the link being posted this way,
{sigh} people actually believe this shit - it's just like global warming - no evidence but the whole fucking world is sold out on it.
The new trend of garbage collected languages (new because they are spread after 2000, not because the concept is new) and the new operating systems (Longhorn, for example) all require computer upgrades. Can they be considered non-environment-friendly then ?
There's no getting around it. Consumption of any material good, including energy, screws everyone by degrading the world we all live in.
Americans will get this, once the Indians and Chinese start using up all the resources at the rate Americans feel they have the right to.
The only solution to live well on less stuff is to "consume" more services -- ideas, massage, community, conversations. When I spend the afternoon talking to my wonderful neighbor, I don't feel the need to drive around looking for fulfillment.
This sounds like absolute bullshit to me. A quarter-ton of fossil fuels to create one PC? 1.5 tons of water? What do they put in them?
I may be wrong, but I think it's nothing more than the United Nations trying to justify its taxpayer-funded existence.
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
You were modded as 'insightful' for repeating the drivel on television?
1L at 1.04 g/cm^3 is a cube 10cm X 10cm X 10cm and weighs in at 1.04 kg. 1500L is a cube approximately 1.15m x 1.15m x 1.15m and weighs 1560kg.
Now you'd like to transport that 1500kg across the world to some poor, impoverished nation and give some thirsty children some water?
How would you like to accompish that? Maybe put it in a truck? Or a boat? Possibly an airplane? You might have to burn some fossil fuels to move it, unless of course you will be willing to pedal and move it by yourself (note, you will need cooling water yourself in order to maintain peak performance and prevent your brain from frying due to overheating).
This new-age drivel is very annoying to listen to. You would have a better chance of relocating the affected individuals to a more 'rich' environment.
Of course, using those computers to predict where hotspots will form is a bad thing- better to be surprised by a hurricane and lose the entire crop across an entire nation, than to 'consume' that 1500L of water. Let's exclude the fact that environmental regulations strictly control what can be returned to the water table, and that fines run into the 100K's for offenses.
Personally, I'd find it prettey interesting to watch you move 1560 kg of water using a bicycle to pull an oxen cart loaded with ~5 55gallon drums of water.
Other facts from the same research:
I bet it takes WAY more material to make a stupid user. Why not cut the fat there instead of going after the little guy? :)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Just making the metal for the case will use a *lot* of water, for coolant etc. You'd be amazed - in some countries, up to and beyond 100 tons of water can be used to make a ton of steel.
Most of the fossil fuels are probably mostly used in various refining materials process - the case, again, a lot of power needed for that. All the different materials in the PC and monitor adds up amazingly fast - remember that the actual raw materials are really cheap, so you don't see much cost due to this when you buy something in a high-street store.
-Chris
I recently had a motherboard die in my 2 year old computer - a 1GHZ P3. So, off I go to the computer store trying to buy a new mobo. Sorry, they don't make them anymore.
Ok, so I try to find out what it would take to buy a cheap replacement that they do have. This is great except for the replacement mobo requires a new CPU since the old one won't work in it. It also uses DDR ram instead of SDRAM. And, it consumes more power, so the old power supply won't work. Oh, and the new power supplies don't fit into the old case, so I need a new case, too.
Of course, I was able to reuse the old drives (hard, floppy, cd) and the old monitor, keyboard & mouse. So it's definately friendlier than buying a whole new PC w/monitor combo. It's cheaper too. Still, IMHO, upgrading is a lot more replacement than upgrade.
$.02
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
I find it very humourous that one second you tell me to get some humanity... and then call me a 'stupid moron' and suggest that I should choke to death on a hamburger and fries. Interesting, I think we've proven which one of us is more qualified to discuss the ecological impacts of using water- a Chemical Engineer Level IV (capable of designing plants) or someone that compares others to sheep (btw, I collect sheep- can you send me a photo of you and one for my collection?)
Now, on to your post- when my company built a plant in China they allowed the workers to bring their families in and shower, clean up, etc. Shanty towns sprung up next door. I'm pretty sure that it wasn't entirely voluntary, but in the end it worked out for both groups.
Now lets talk about water regulation: In the US water outlets are strickly regulated. Plants must have water monitoring tools, take samples, observe, and report any and all spills or problems, on a regular basis or face severe economic penalties.
I've seen silver sludge, as black as your heart-felt comments, come out drinkable. In fact, I watched the lead engineer down a glass that, moments before, was as toxic as your words.
Of course, I don't agree with the economic policies that force pollution out to 3rd will countries- but there isnt' a damn thing that can be done to stop it until those countries force the same regulations.
Anyways, thank you for holding up some more posters of preservation. It's been entertaining.
Unlike your refrigerator, radio, television, or microwave, you can't just buy a computer today and expect it to run the latest software 2-4 years from now.
While your refrigerator, radio, television, or microwave can handle the latest in food and radio-broadcast entertainment, software has an ever-changing specification. The computer must conform to the software.
You can upgrade a computer to some extent, but eventually, the system bus speeds reach their peak (if the hardware itself hasn't died).
I'm all for upgrading a PC or "recycling" an old one to people who have less sophisticated needs for a computer.
Even a 486 or a Pre-G3 Power Macintosh can surf the web and do email.
But I'm a gamer and an enthusiast. I upgrade/rebuild my rig constantly, and as far as I know, only my basement suffers from the aggregation of old parts... at least the ones I can't use to build mini Linux PCs.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
This is such a non-story. What is the point of the study?
The computer manufacturing business is one of the most cut throat businesses on the planet. Every tiny bit of slack in the process must be eliminated in order to stay competitive. This means that they must use as few raw materials as possible. Energy consumption is minimized. The part count is kept to a minimum. There is as little waste as possible.
Let's talk about some of the positive impacts of computer use. I use mine with VPN to handle work for customers without traveling. This results in fewer plane rides, rental cars, and sitting in traffic. In my professional work I use computers to monitor environmental impact at manufacturing and industrial plants. I also use them to help make the processes more efficient which lessens the environmental impact of the activities.
Computers are also used to mange traffic in large cities. They are used to manage public transportation facilities. I've done work for logistics companies that manage the shipment of goods to reduce fuel consumption, lessening the environmental impact of these activities.
Let's face it. Computers are the most valuable modern tool that we have developed. The impact of manufacturing one is more than offset by all of the positive impacts of their use.
Worrying about the environmental impact of producing this valuable tool when we already know how competitive it is to manufacture them and how efficiently it is already done seems really silly.
Perhaps we should do a study of the impact of all of the CO2 that is emitted during worthless UN debates. Certainly it is impacting global warming in an adverse fashion.
Hey UN, stop worrying about inane crap like this. Last I heard there was some shit going down in Haiti that you might want to concentrate on. While you're at it, Kim Jong Il is starving his people. I'm sure there are a lot of other areas of much higher impact that you could concentrate on. You do some really good work out there. This type of study isn't helping though.
But, computers minimize the use of paper,ink etc.
I'd like to see a study comparing the the resources it requires to build a computer vs. the number of papers saved etc.
... actually 'restore' the condition of the water downstream.
Papermills are notoriously pollutive- they use quite a bit of pH-basic material in the process. There is a well documented instance (sadly I can not locate an online reference) of water being polluted thru acidic mine discharge (AMD) and being 'fixed' downstream from a papermill that discharches additional 'treated' water from their process. The before/after photos are breathtaking- you've got dead trees looking like a swampland and then, just past the plant, is any normal looking river (Except the trees are still smaller- they've not fully grown back to hardwoods that you'd expect to find around a river)
Anyways, yes, water is 'consumed' at that papermill. Fortunately, it's also 'returned' in a state that restores the ecological balance that was present at a time in the past. If the grand-parent poster had his way, that wouldn't even be allowed.... and we'd have one more dead, polluted river in need of fixing.
(not all papermills work out that well, sadly. most are just as guilty as the original mines for dumping their tailings and letting it leach out)
The amount of ore mined for the very small amounts of silver, gold, tantalum, etc is more than that.
Mod that baby up. Dumping energy into a water stream has a massive impact on the surrounding ecology.
I'm sure most of the US people have heard of the manatees- the power plants in Florida have discharge channels that are long and wide and attract hundreds of the 'sea cows' each year. Why? Because the water being returned (reclaimed) comes out quite a bit warmer than the water it's going back into.
This translates to a literal calving ground of protected, tempered water. The plants even run a little tourist center for people to come in and watch the manatees - heh there's even a little hose that drops 'fresh' water into the discharge channel. Watch the creatures pull up under it and drink from a 'novel' non-salt containing water.... I think it gets them drunk, but then again if you've watched a manatee swim you'll swear they are all drunk.
But in this case the energy return is quite benefitial to the surroundings. Usually it's not- think of the Alaskan pipeway that draws heated oil from the wells to distribution. That permafrost underneath NEEDS to be kept cold, yet we are radiating millions of therms of energy above it to keep the oil from freezing solid. So it's a complete tradeoff in that sense- the coldest environment that MUST stay cold has the hottest (And capable of generating the most heat) mere meters above it. I think the pipes are about 2.5m off the ground, to allow animals to pass thru.
The dissolved O2 problem is real, but not as big as you think. I'd place more issue around the extra few degrees in the winter than on the amount of O2 present (algae can have a more devastating effect from phosphate dumping)
In the US its called "Superfund" billions of taxpayer dollars to litigate/clean up sites that companies were too irresponsible to keep un contaminated. Companies don't do extra work that makes them less competetive unless the government mandates it.
I'm pretty sure china/"3rd world" have much less restrictrive environmental rules, so the cost of running a clean business aren't there.
Exactly. You typically do not want to have to condition 'fresh' water for use in your equipment at every stage of the game. Besides, water coming into a plant has loads of bacteria and algae, which tend to muck up the heat exchangers ;)
A settling tank eats alot of real-estate, but those HUGE tanks then have to overflow to another tank, which overflows to another tank.... which might then be clean enough to discharge.
I think the tank we use has a number of blades to keep it stirred and allow any bacteria to properly clean up the water before it's fed back to a city 'treatment' plant. The bacteria actually 'learn' what noxious chemicals are in the water and eat them up... although it does take a few days of lagtime from the introduction of, say Acetone, to convert to, say Toluene.
I'm sure plenty of stoned envirotypes will start flailing around their faded tye dies and cracked beads. Sitting on their wicker chairs, they lean forward, with their elbows on their knees and hands leaning out, as if the way to act intelligent was through body language and not speech. They repeat "1.5 tons of water" in a zombie like hysteria.
Now I know that these are interesting animals, after all, the little red ones in the fish tank are interesting too, but, I will close the curtain on their madness for your own good.
Water is extraoridinarly heavy. Water weights
A cubic foot of water weighs about 62 pounds.
1.5 tons of water is about the same amount of water that you use taking a shower or a bath. I'll do my part for more efficient computing, and would skip showering one day per year to make up for my prolifigate use of water. But most environmentalists never shower, so I'll just assume they did it for me!
This is my sig.
Actually as much as I'd like to see OLED succeed, the formation of the materials are very toxic. I agree with 100% what you say, but look a few of them up on the web.
;)
The materials used typically involve heavy metal catalyst, huge quantities of solvent (almost all OLED materials are uniquely insoluble- the rocks in my front yard are easier to get into solution), and extended purification to get to the requisite 99.9% purities.
And.... the actual coatings... dont' get me started there
(Yes, I've worked on OLED projects and I know what I'm talking about)
Perhaps the only effective argument against the use of water, besides the possibility of contaminating it with pollutants, is thermal pollution. The unexpected changes in water temperature do a surprising number on the ecology of surrounding bodies of water, particularly in terms of algae and bacteria. It can even extend the fishing season.
It's a considerable issue because half of the total water drawn in the US goes to cooling power plants.
Environmentalists consider it to be a problem, but nothing on the order of global warming. Thermal pollution is just a necessary biproduct of energy conversion. *shrug*
The two tons of bullshit it takes to sell a Mac.
OK, so it wasn't very percise; it was intended as an order-of-magnitude figure, because after some googling, everywhere seems to disagree on usage. Several reports cite 30-50 tons water / ton steel in China; 5-6 tons water/ton steel in the USA and Japan due to higher tech and more regulation; another couple cite 'a ton of steel can take 280 tons of water', though this sounds doubtful in comparison to the others. An Indian report cites up to 300 tons.
Google for "ton of steel" "tons of water".
-Chris
Agreed - of the 1.5 metric tons of water, some very small part is likely to be polluted and actually "used" - the rest just passes through the various plants to cool them and back into the ocean. That's one lie.
Starting up many of the plants in this process involves the initialization procedure of any number of robots in Fabs or kettles, ovens, etc. Starting up each plant is required to make the first PC or monitor, but it isn't required for the second. Much of the fossil fuels spent in particular suggest they've included initialization costs. That's two lies.
At least in the US, very few people buy CRT monitors anymore. It's too cheap and easy (and cool) to get an LCD. That's 3 lies.
And much of the energy loss is in whatever powerplant runs all of these processes - it's not like AMD burns coal alongside their Fab to keep the thing running. What kind of power plant did they assume? Obviously not the most efficient - Nuclear - or most of the fossil fuels spent would not have made it into the numbers, and some mention of radioactive waste would be included instead. That's 3 lies and a pulled-the-wool-over-your-eyes.
That is it the same people that brought you the Kyoto treaty are back again.
Save a whale, kill an environmentalist
"1.5 tons of water is about the same amount of water that you use taking a shower or a bath."
Actually, er, no. My shower head is a 2.5 gpm water saver, but let's consider an old fashioned 6 gpm water waster mega fountain. Now, I like long showers, but more than 10 minutes? I don't think so. So 6 gpm times 10 minutes is 60 gallons, or 229 kg - a far cry from 1500 kg!
Now, since I am using only 2.5 gpm and it has an instant on-off button on it, I only need maybe 50 kg even for a 10 minute shower.
BTW, the water saver shower heads provide a very satisfying output.
While at one level you're right that earth's ecosystem is a "closed loop" for the most part and there is LOTS of water in the system, I think only about 1% is fresh, while the rest is seawater, which isn't nearly as useful for human purposes. You might also point out that fresh water is not a finite resource like oil or coal- it is being created continuously by evaporation and deposited as precipitation.
However, it takes time for water to completge the cycle. Water that you "use" to water your lawn, take a shower or build a computer doesn't go straight back into the reserves of usable water- it either evaporates or is polluted.
In many parts of the country and world, we are starting to run out of fresh water because it is being pulled out of wells, lakes and rivers faster than it is being replenished by nature. The result is that the water levels in the huge underground aquifers that are the primary repository of fresh water are starting to drop, with potentially dire ecological consequences. Sure, it will come back if we stop using it, but that doesn't seem to happen.
So basically, yes, it matters a lot how much water is "used" in the making of a computer.
There's 1,400,000 BTU in a gallon of gas. LA to NY is 2,448 miles, at 30 mpg (lets be generous) is 81.6 gallons of fuel which is 114,240,000 BTU. Your coal that you mentioned has, by comparison, 5,100,000 BTU. In other words, it takes ALOT less energy to make the CRT.
Also, you're per capita figures are off. About 920,000 BTU are used per day per person in the U.S., or about 327,520,000 BTU annually. This makes the CRT 1.5% of ENERGY consumption. Since most people only buy 1 monitor per several years, that's not nearly as high as you suggest.
Now, as far as money goes, since we're using averages, we can use the per capita after-tax income of someone in the U.S., which is somewhere around $20,000. Once you calculate taxes and such you get to the EBI (Effective Buying Income), which is per capita after-tax income, which is only about $14,000, making the monitor about .9%.
In other words, the environmental costs are much higher for making the CRT than people are paying for, which is exactly what the UN report is trying to highlight.
No, I'm not a Luddite or environmental wacko. But the PC industry is pretty messed up right now and really needs to change. To wit:
1. CPU power consumption keeps increasing at a dramatic rate, even though the vast majority of PCs are underutilized by ~80%. That is, people buy a 2.8GHz P4 because it's the lowest end model sold by Dell in a desktop (seriously!), even though they just do web browsing, play simple Flash games, and use Word. Fortunately, LCD monitors have more than balanced this out, at least for now, but with 150W CPUs coming before year's end, I don't know how long it will last.
2. Games drive things far too much. Why does every PC made since 1997 include AGP hardware? Why do you get a heatsink and fan-laden nVidia 5200 with most all-but-bottom-end PCs? Why have power supplies jumped up to the 400-450W range? Because there's a very vocal gamer market that has been driving PC hardware development. In reality, high-end PCs games don't even sell all that well. The huge selling games are things like The Sims and Roller Coaster Tycoon and generally not cutting edge 3D games.
3. PCs are far too general purpose. They're designed to do everything, but nothing really well. It's still far too common to see Xbox games that utterly blow away PC games, even though the Xbox has 64MB *total* RAM and a PC game requires 128MB of *video* RAM. You have people buying the P4 Extreme Edition solely because they spend most of their time doing video compression. Really, wouldn't a video compression chip that outperforms the CPU by 10x be preferrable? (Note: This is coming in the next nVidia chipset this spring.) Wouldn't we be better off with CPUs designed more for languages like Python, ones that use 1/10 the power of existing processors? Ericsson prototyped a CPU for their concurrent functional language Erlang, and they got *massive* speedups and a power consumption in the range of 1 watt.
4. Processor speed, memory requirements, they've all gotten very soft and meaningless. You see tables in Dell catalogs saying that 2.8GHz is good for email and web browsing, but 3.0GHz is much better for games. Hello? That's only a 7% performance difference! Similarly, people blindly advocate 1GB over 512MB without any real reason.
I meant more along the lines of environmental richness - living in the Saraha desert doesn't make life exactly the easiest.
Living in rocky outcropping makes food difficult to raise and transport. You may expend more energy and work transporting food over a range than obtain from consuming it.
Anyways, my bad- I should have explained I wasn't referencing any economic aspect, just the environment.
(thats why most early civs bracketed rivers and floodplains....)
"It says a PC uses more than ten times its weight in fossil fuels and chemicals to manufacture."
Big damn deal. A clothespin uses more than ten times its weight in fossil fuels and chemicals to manufature.
If there was someone who would take these things and use them, I'd gladly give them away. However, I'm going to have to pay to have them recycled. which kind of sucks, because I'm sure the HP 4si is not junk. `8r/ aw well.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Crafting a nice pile of feces takes several more liters of water, both in the production of the feces (many digestive processes are hydro-based) and its removal down the sewers.
Are you gonna stop pooping?
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
ROFL...where the heck have you been getting your information? That is completely opposite from the truth. The U.S. has one of the highest immigration rates in the world, definitely higher than Western Europe, especially when you consider illegal immigration.
The thing about "using" water is that... well, after you use it, it's still water. You can dump chemicals into, you can shit in it, it's still water. So it's hard to say that it's "consumed." Really it's just dirtied, and can be cleaned and turned back into clean water somehwat more easily than, say, replacing oil that was burned.
Thankyou. I wanted to point that out too but I'm supposed to be working... :-)
jsms
You can't destroy the water. It either gets dirty and is purified or turns into steam and joins with the atmosphere and gets precipitated out into the biosphere.
240 kilograms of fossil fuels
22 kilograms of chemicals
1,500 kilograms of water
Far more than $250, right? But these corps can acquire all that, turn it into a 17-inch monitor, ship it to me, and make a profit. It boggles the mind.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
And it still takes only pennies on the dollar to pay workers overseas to put them together.
1m^3 has a mass of exactly 1 Tonne (Metric) by definition
1m^3 = 1.102 Short (US) Tons
1m^3 = 0.984 Long (Old UK) Tons
I'm amazed to see ppl on /. surprised at the weight of water. Over here in Europe where we use the metric system it's common knowledge 1000Kg=1Tonne=1m^3 as it's so easy to remember.
My spelling isn't bad, I'm evolving the language
After investing littereally tons of material over the couse of a lifetime, the human body represents an enormous investment in resources, which should really be recycled as thoroughly as is possible. So stop throwing those bodies out in the trash, or burying them in the flower garden, recycle them. Particularly if they are hot chicks!
Steel manufacture does take a lot of water, but I don't think it is as bad as IC manufacture where the water becomes toxic.
Also, the water does cycle over again, but minimizing use means that infrastructure needs to be updated less often and less energy used to push the water around.
Now look at how many trees are being saved as a result of e-mail, the web, IM, and other collaborative technologies. Now there are alternatives to plain old snail mail spam that are hopefully saving a few trees at the expense of our collective annoyance. If it weren't for the net, the post office would have to change its slogan...through rain, sleet, snow or Slashdot.
1500 kg of that is water. It's not used up--it's supposed to be treated and then sent down the drain. It gets recycled fairly quickly. My monitor doesn't contain a ton and a half of water--does yours? So where did that water go? We each use about 200 kg of water per day just in our homes--washing laundry, flushing toilets, showering. 1500 kg seems like a lot, but we each use that much every week.
240 kg of fossil fuels. Well, that's a possibility. How is that assessed? That's (ballpark) a hundred gallons of gasoline. That's what someone living 25 miles from work might use in two months of commuting. It's not enough fuel to get your motorhome to the Grand Canyon and back for your vacation this summer. The figure also assumes that all the energy used to produce the computer comes from fossil fuels. If nuclear energy was used, that 240 kg of fuel corresponds to roughly 2 cubic centimetres (half a teaspoon) of unenriched uranium. If hydroelectricity was used, the cost would be kinetic energy from many tons of moving water. (See note above regarding the recycling of water.)
22 kg of 'chemicals'. Well, that's certainly vague. Water is a chemical. Some of those chemicals are acutely nasty. Some are moderately unpleasant. Some will be relatively harmless. Does that 22 kg include the finished product? I mean, the computer itself with CRT is probably up around ten or fifteen kilograms...
Other posters have already noted that a useful report would compare these totals to the resources used in the production of other products: home appliances, automobiles, cotton. (The Aral Sea is drying up largely because of cotton growing in the area. It takes about 5000 kg of water to grow one kilogram of cotton. The environmental costs of the pesticides and bleaches used in cotton production I will leave for another post.)
~Idarubicin
OK so all that water is used, let's see.... where does the water go? Oh look it's mostly still water when you're done using it. And the environmental cost? What is it, the weight of materials "used" tells us nothing directly of that. These kinds of sensational articles are pretty useless. How much air was "used" by the employees who assembled the PC breathing?
The problem I have with this kind of nonsense is that making PCs keeps the economy going somewhere. Not making a PC has economic and social implications that are far reaching. Those resources getting consumed feeds millions of people down the supply chain and keeps the wheels of industry turning. Simply stopping that would not be a good thing.
I've seen the cartoon, and it takes an entire tree to make a toothpick.
Then it's good to choose a platform (i.e., PC Architecture) that's based on an "open-spec" of compatible, interchangable motherboards, power supplies, keyboards, mice, memory, PCI cards, disk drives, etc, than a "closed box" architecture?
Dare I say it? I'll get modded down, but this means that PCs are better for the environment than Macs!
Best Buy can have you arrested
Would you want to be drinking the "again" water after a trip through the fabrication plant? Or how about the water from the steel foundry that does the "bending metal" you referred to?
====------====
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
And if you think that's bad, think of all these PC's going into the landfills in a few years.
We need to recycle systems more.
I'm a disabled American and took it upon myself to do something about it.
http://www.systemrecycler.com
(This site is new and UC, please be kind to my bandwidth!)
Ok, um, first off, 1.5 tons of water is about 1500lbs, or around 700kgs (give or take a few).
Another way to look at it, 8.3 lbs per gallon x 6 gpm x 10 minutes = about 250 lbs. So its a weeks worth of showers for one person. Or, watering the back yard for one night. It's just not that much water.
"BTW, the water saver shower heads provide a very satisfying output." You must be out of your mind. My house has these water saver shower heads and I'm looking to see what I can do to get even more water per minute, not more velocity, not more area, but, flat out, more water per minute. Every other efficiency contrivance is a lie that I know is designed to make me think I'm getting more of something than I really am. But I know more water when I feel it, and I'm not going to be tricked any more. All I have to do is get a cistern set up in my back yard to make sure that the rain that lands in my land won't go into someone else's shower head, all for me. I just have to have more land. I need to own around 10,000 acres or so, and just boot all of the commoners into some kind of a slum that exists on one or two acres in the corner, probably where I have my trash.
This is my sig.
Thanks to a nuclear power plant, there's a bit
of ocean teaming with life. I like that.
I think we need to be very ecologically conscious with everything we do, however, your use of wateraid.org to counter BeCre8iv's remark is a mistake.
Driving into work each day has become very routine, but I'm pretty sure I don't drive into ethiopia to go to work at the semiconductor plant I work in. I don't recall reading about any of the hardware manufacturers I purchase from being from Ethiopia. And I don't recall ever reading or seeing any reports on Ethiopia as one of the worlds centers for high tech industrial manufacturing.
But what I think most people don't realize, or choose to ignore because these wild environmental statements sound much better to them than the truth, is that the water UTILIZED to manufacture computer components is recycled many times over. And the bulk of the water that is not recycled in the process is treated, tested, and returned to the environment. I'm not speaking from the outside as some techie, I see it everyday I go to work.
And aside from the lack of truth in these statements, they simply don't make any economical sense. When you start to run the numbers on what it would cost to manufacture components based on the resources these environmental groups suggest are consumed you will find that all these high tech manufacturers would not be in business very long for what they charge for their end products.
We can always improve and we can never let down our guard. You will find some bad apples in the industry and they must be dealt with. However, wording statements so they will intentionally be misunderstood by the uninformed just to further one's own agenda only takes away from the credibility of the individuals and organizations making the statements. And without credibility it is not likely that anyone, except those who have already made up their mind, will believe anything that comes from these individuals and organizations.
burnin
A CRT is hardWARE, btw. A monitor often has a lot more wear in it than most people get from them.
How to make a monitor last longer:
1) Keep the brightness down at the level that black is black, not gray.
2) Adjust the contrast well below the point that you note the white dots from blooming [expanding].
The net of this is you are stressing the circuitry less [IE the image will maybe somewhat dimmer than you are used to]. The natural process of phosphor darkening that occurs over time progresses more slowly at lower brightness levels.
I have been using the same 17" monitor since 1997, and the image still looks near perfect. I have a cheap Samtron 14" that I used for 5 years continuously [purchased in 1992, and now used occasionally] that still has a sharp and bright image.
The only reason I have bought new monitors is for analog capabilities or for the larger display area.
Lastly, the monitors I use at work [1994, 1996 Mfg dates] and still have very good images.
I'm glad I got Samba 3.0 running on my SE/30 this weekend. It makes a great little PDC for my single client home network.
Constitutionally Correct
So, I figured I'd ask here. I'm an officer for the Electrical and Computer Engineering Honor Society Eta Kappa Nu Beta Xi Chapter at the Univ. of Oklahoma. One thing we're VERY interested in is putting together a Recycling Event for sometime in late 2004 or early 2005 (the next academic school year).
Any suggestions on how we should go about this? I've sent an e-mail to Dell's Recycling people, and have yet to get a response back. Has anyone else done this? This is almost an ask slashdot question, but I don't want to take up an entire story for it...
1. How much have these cost in the past?
2. Are there organizations that might bankroll at least part of the expenses?
3. Which organizations buy the old machines?
4. Who pays for shipping the old parts?
5. How much leadtime should we need to get something like this pulled off?
6. Who can we talk to for some pointers?
We're a campus of about 27,000 students, in a Norman, with a population of about 110,000 people, about 20 minutes south of Oklahoma City with a population of about a million people. I think we're going to target the Norman, OK area this time. Is this wise? If not, why?
Feel free to answer any / all of these.
Thanks for your help.
Any errors in spelling, tact, or fact are transmission errors.
Michael C. Hollinger
1.5 tons of water. But all of that gets reused eventually. I mean, it's not like it gets jettisoned into space, or converted into energy.
Yeah, but you know where the water comes from, right? Squeezed out of small puppies!!! God-damn industrialists.
Would someone please re-locate the UN 500 miles due east, and Timothy along with it?
You wanna have PCs, or even a life, you're going to use resources. You don't want to use resources, I'd suggest a two week visit to the Canadian woods in May, maybe someplace around Sudbury. Naked.
If you survive it will change your whole dumbass Pinky/Greenie outlook on Nature. Two tons of WATER?! Who the fuck cares! Nature sure as hell doesn't.
Fucking UN communists! FUCK OFF!!!!
then the ingredients won't weigh anything.
"1.7 metric tons of material are consumed by making one PC"
Bullshit! What are we doing, fusion? The 1.5 metric tons of water doesn't disappear. It gets recycled in one way or another. Yeah, the fabrication process is very chemical intensive, but the big manufacturers (Intel, AMD) have strict environmental policies. They recycle where they get, purify their outflows, and use as little material as possible.
Both for cost-cutting sake and environmental law sake.
So that 1.5 metric tons of water is reused over and over and over in making each PC. The actual specific waste per PC should be measured as the material that leaves the manufacturing factory per day (as waste) divided by the number of pieces of hardware it made that day.
For computer geeks, you guys are really stupid.
That is, unless your PC weights 1.7 metric tons.
Duh?
Favorite
But isn't that water just a part of life?
/.'ing.
If you really wanted to see what uses the most raw materials, what about a human being? Or an elephant (both domestic [zoo] and wild ones), etc.?
Or even how much raw materials are needed for one byte of
You're reading this at 640x480? Go buy a new monitor before you go blind, you cheap bastard!
Next time I suggest you read what the parent ACTUALLY said before you comment.
Please, please read "Biomimicry" by Jeanine Benyus (sp). It goes into how much more efficient nature is at design in terms of byproducts, recyling, and plain old utility. At first, my hubris got in the way and I felt like "no way, we are so smart and technologically advanced". By the end of the book, my ego was destroyed. Any single thing we can think of has been done "better" by nature, even if it doesn't fit our needs exact. The book recommends taking the wisdom of natures' designs and applying it to our own needs in a way that doesn't compromise the spirit of nature's original design.
degree in Civil Engineering, and I will never intentionally set foot in a building that I know was designed by one of my classmates. [There's a problem when someone in their junior year doesn't understand that 10kPa compression = -10kPa tension]
The only good thing is that an engineering degree is not enough to be a person who can sign off on the design of m
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I feel very strong now...
Be an elitist - read Slashdot at +4.
Where did you dig that number up? I've got CRTs that are 20 years old and still work fine. I've seen a few CRTs with patterns burned into them from running 8 or more hours a day, but they still work for years.
The gripes I have about CRT's are:
Lead: Cathode ray tubes have landed in city dumps for decades. Got lead in your ground water, yet?
Radiation: I've already had cancer once, it was enough. I use LCD screens whenever I can now. I suspect some long term damage to vision, too, as my peripheral vision appears more acute. I still have excellent eyesight, but I'm not as old as I'm planning to be.
Deskspace: They take up too much realestate.
Power: Suck lots, though not as much as the CPU does.
On the Pro side, they've typically looked better than most LCD's, so I stuck with the behemoths until a year ago when I figured Samsung finally had one worth getting (Syncmaster 172t, it's only real problem is it's too bright even on the lowest setting!)
How much material is required to dispose of a personal computer?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Actually, I would recommend people upgrade from CRT to the best LCD they can afford.
:)
In a single year, my LCD uses at least 100kWh less than a CRT. 1kWh ~= 2lbs/1KG of coal, so the CO2 emissions in manufacture are offset by a ~ 3 year life span.
But that's not all. In the summer in most office buildings, you have to add the air conditionning costs- those CRT hogs create a lot of waste heat, so you have to waste even more energy to remove that heat. You can also have a smaller batter and/or UPS.
While the energy costs alone won't justify the cost of replacing your CRTs, the increase in productivity certainly will. Better contrast has meant fewer headaches for me, and I can read much faster off my LCD (granted, 1600*1200) than I can on most flickering CRTs.
Even a 1% increase in productivity -assuming it's not all wasted on slashdot- is worth quite a bit more money than the LCD for any professional.
So, a cheap productivity boost with a small or positive environmental footprint... In my ideal world, the old machines would be recycled with an efficient OS and an LCD screen
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Some of the highlights:
They were able to reduce energy consumption at one plant by 60% with better design.
[rant]One of the things I don't like about these studies that tell you how much water it takes to build your car or get you a hamburger patty is that they are aimed at consumers. Maybe we should increase the cost of water and fossil fuels, or the penalties for being wasteful, so that manufacturers might get with the program and stop being such hogs.[/rant]
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
As I'm from California, originally from the Los Angeles area, I've read a lot about the value of water as a non-renewable resource. We are rapidly using up one of our most precious resources. Industry and agriculture are still incredibly wasteful with water, because it's ridiculously cheap for them.
After the Owens River project wore out, Southern California has continued to look for a place to pipe in water. Desalinization is not a feasable solution, as it's far too expensive. Industry and agriculture has become more efficient with water use, but it's still just not enough.
--n
how much fuel and water does it take to manufacture 1kw worth of solar electric panels?
In fact, I'm having lots of fun these days playing vintage versions of Day of the Tentacle (man, that was scenario-writing ! Where are those guys gone ?) even though I finished the game a good many times already. And I still enjoy Falconeye's version of NetHack, which is everything but a hog as far as CPU, memory and GFX requirements are concerned.
I used to be fond of simple adventure games, where the quality of the scenario and the subtlety of the enigmas were the main strengths of the game. I can't seem to find any of these any longer...
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
1500 lbs of water can be reclaimed this is just more eco BS. The manufactures could probably do better but this is alarmist.
That was originally true, when the metric system was developed during the French revolution, but is not nearly a precise enough statement for modern science and industry. (The density of water changes with pressure and temperature, so you'd have to carefully specify those, for one thing, to make a good definition. Also, water is a liquid, making it less useful as a mass reference because you need a container for it.
Anyway, these days a meter is defined by as the distance light travels in a certain, very small, amount of time. A m^3 is just the volume of a cube 1 m on a side and a kg is defined to be the weight of a certain metallic bar housed in, I think, France.
Water has a density of 1 tonne/m^3 (or 1 g/cm^3) give or take a few percent depending on temperature.
I'm wondering about the use of the term "used" when speaking about water and manufacturing. I used to work in a plastics molding factory. You wouldn't believe the amount of water needed to cool the molds when producing tiny plastic parts. But the water isn't "used". It doesn't suddenly become some other toxic material, and it doesn't immediately become waste water.
It would be too expensive to pay the water company and use the water once before dumping it somewhere. It is reused. This of course applies to a US manufacturing firm.
-Fred
Fortunately, many people regularly fail to shower, bathe, brush their teeth, wash dishes, or use the bathroom because of their PCs.
...one of my firewalls to a Compaq Contura 50MHz 486. The power supply says that it takes only 26W.
Various OpenBSD people get excited with the Soekris. I think this super-486 board is underpowered for the price. I'd like to see a Transmeta Crusoe or VIA Eden in the same form factor, which should be much faster. Never seen one though.
2500 gallons is like 10 TONS of water.
They're not saying "ban computers", they're saying "we could do better." If you don't think we could do better- what happened to constant improvement? Kaizen?
Stop being a crypto-socialist.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
They're not saying "stop using" anything.
They're saying that there is room for improvement.
You don't believe in improvement? My god, what a neanderthal.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
1.8 Metric Tons of mostly water is relatively
dirt cheap. It takes 2500 to 6000 gal of
water to produce 1 lb of beef. Which weighs
9 to 22 Metric Tons.
Put an axis on those wacko claims!
How about +5 Wrong?
http://www.ipodbattery.com/
You do NOT need to ship the whole iPod back. I am so sick of seeing that false statement repeated everywhere I look.
And there is about 1.7E24 Kg of water in the ocean, a lot more locked up in lithospheric rock. When everyone on the planet gets one thousand computers and monitors each, we will have "used up" (I assume that means lost in hyperspace, most water I know about gets reused) about 6E9 * 1E3 * 1.5E3 Kg of water, or about 9E15 Kg, which will lower the ocean surface by 25 millimeters. I guess we will have to increase global warming just a tad to melt some glaciers and fill back in. The other material will lower the land surface by an average of 1mm, which will make the distance to orbit much higher, rendering space travel very difficult :-)
:-(
Of course, these scare stories are nonsense, promoted by people that don't understand arithmetic. The major negative consequence of computers is their energy consumption during use. Newer models provide more computation per watt than older models, so old ones should be recycled and the materials they are made of re-used more efficiently. I know of at least two people that went bankrupt assuming that re-using old computers was commercially viable. That said, there is a place for old computers right now, but I hope such niches are filled by modest-performance, ultra-low-power new machines. The performance of a 486-50 grade computer with monitor can be exceeded by a hundred dollars worth of state-of-the-art hand-held hardware consuming perhaps a watt (assuming an available source of natural backlight for the 640x480 LCD screen).
The most important thing is to use that computation wisely and efficiently. Better software can help that. Replacing Windoze with smaller, less bloated OSes can do that, too. Think about how much energy is wasted computing the pixels for Clippy.
Keith Lofstrom server-sky.com
Well, since that water is not being destroyed, I wind up drinking it sooner or later.
Hence water cycle.
No, I don't worry too much about it. Purifying water is a progressively-better understood technology.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
...even the LCDs.
That being said, there is an element of truth to what you are saying too. But I'll never rush out to buy a monitor just so I can shove the old one in a landfill. It's full of particularly toxic parts, and I'd rather not.
I even keep all my old motherboards.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Just because water is USED, does not mean that it dissapears or is wasted. Coolant water evaporates back into the environment.
It would be nice to see other cities and communities (and indivduals) doing the same instead of sending "obsolete" computers and parts to the landfill.
People don't live in the desert where no food can be grown. Mass starvation, in every case is caused by either government bungling such as Mao's The Great Leap Forward program or outright malice, such as every other instance I know of.
Interestingly, someone posted a versions of this rant in a story about Aid to Zimbabwe, despite the fact that Zimbabwe has one of the most fertile land in Africa. People are starving over there because the agricultural economy has been all but destroyed by malicious mismanagement.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Clean up your computer!
is a site explaining some of the ethical background over
who really made your computer (and other electronic components).
According to their report,
more than 1/3 of all computers are made in third-world countries.
The workers are low-skilled and low-paid, and often women.
Many are employed on consecutive short-term contracts (3 months at most), so they're in fear of loosing their jobs.
Factory conditions may be unsafe, wages below the legal minimums, with compulsory overtime.
Workers are often faced with degrading treatment.
Take the Electronics employment quiz
to see if you could get a job at a Mexican electronics factory.
(Hint: there's discrimination in hiring practices)
-mrv
As far as commonly-replaced consumer goods go, I think that computer cases are very low on the spectrum of "environmentally hostile objects".
That was my point.
My other point is that this article doesn't even mention the notion that maybe PC manufacturers could be more environmentally responsible. They just put the onus on the consumer, and say "Upgrade, don't replace!" as if that's going to be the only way to get on top of this problem.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
There is a great Penn and Teller Bulls**t episode on environmental hysteria, that makes basically this same point (albeit with a little more humor injected).
The only rational environmentalist in the show is a GreenPeace founder who actually quit because the organization got overrun by politically motivated sleazebags.
It's a hilarious way to kill an hour if you get Showtime.
Yikes! Is there a shortage of matter in the universe that using 1.8 tons of it is a burden? The sooner we can make pure energy computing evices the better. Or is there a shortage of that too?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
> You'd need your own power plant just to read /.
Yeah, but considering how many people were on the Internet back in the 1950s, just imagine how often you'd get FP!
> passanger cars have not improved their efficency that much.
Don't get me wrong, fuel inefficiency is one of my pet peeves, but I think actual passenger car efficiency has improved. For example, you couldn't buy a Corolla in 1950 that gets 30 or 40 miles to the gallon. However, average efficiency of all the cars on the (US) road hasn't improved that much due to things like the Dodge trucks with "V8 Hemi" you see making the heavy-duty trip to the cleaners and the bank, or the Hummers that spend all of their time sitting in traffic. Those people should die.
and a very strong argument for trying to leverage older equipment, not to mention upgrading rather than replacing.
Yes, whatever. Things are not going to change anytime soon. Manufacturing companies, more than ever, are making items with the intention of them being thrown away. Just look at all the fancy plastics used to package a simple pair of scissors. That plastic, destined for the garbage, took "millions of years" for the raw components to be produced.
Fact is, the enviroment takes a back seat in the path of capitalism.
If it's from Dell, I'd say it takes about 1/4 of a forest to make up all of the packaging and paperwork they include.
Some people are like slinkys. They're useless, but it puts a smile on your face to push them down the stairs.
In terms of weight, the total amount of materials used is about equal to that of a mid-size car.
That's great, but I would find it more interesting to compare this to the amount of materials used to create a mid-sized car. If you are not reading carefully, you might think that is what's being compared... but it isn't.
Takes tons and tones of raw materials to make and tons more to maintain.
Upgrades available where allowed by law.
Downgrades available in any alley on the east coast of the USA.
Sporterizing is allowed.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
People who have never been outside the industrialized world cannot imagine what a luxury is clean, running water. The principal time-activity of women and children in the Third World is hauling water. The non-industrialized population is perhaps 4.5 billion of the Earth's 6 billion people. Overall, gathering water may be the principal time-consuming activity of all humanity. I know it outranks sex.
"...while history is usually explicable it is often irrational" --Roger Spiller
The 1.5 metric tons of water doesn't disappear. It gets recycled in one way or another.
And how do you recycle that water? You need more inputs to do it properly, or you spend less and discharge it, soiling the water table or the ocean. You *do* know there is a fresh water shortage that will become chronic within a couple of decades. You want to know how people compete when there is not enough water? Take a look at Palestine and Israel - most of their disagreements are about the skewed rationing of the scarce water supply.
Producing advanced CMOS technology is an awfully dirty business, and much of our advanced technological base relies on the easy availability of stored solar energy as fossil fuels. As other posters have pointed out, every year even simple things like Agriculture burn several dozens or tens of dozens of years of stored solar energy. Annually I believe the total is around 400 years worth of solar input consumed per year. Obviously, things will have to change one day because the bank of solar energy is not infinite - as much as classical economists might like to think it is. Eventually your inputs disappear, or the cost to extract them is greater than potential energy yield so they are effectively worthless.
Da Blog
The water coming out of a chip fab is usually relatively safe. Most of the chemicals you mention are relatively easy to separate from water. This means that if your plant is in the US or another country with reasonable environmental protection laws, there is much less contamination. I'm not saying that you'd want to drink it, but after a while bacteria and UV will break the chemicals down, and the overall environmental impact will be small (although not zero). In countries like Korea or Taiwan this is less likely to be the case, but companies will still usually try to reclaim and reuse chemicals (since they do cost a lot of money).
The problem with your argument is that these so-called experts have no idea about what they're talking about. Let me explain:
"And how do you recycle that water?", you ask? Generally, some of the ways of doing it are...
1) Evaporation & Condensation
2) Filtering
3) Biological catalysis (popular with sewage)
And I completely disagree that there's a fresh water shortage. Rainfall in the US has not decreased in the past decade and I know of no environmentalist who has even claimed that global warming would decrease rainfall (it might actually increase it!). Rainfall gives you fresh water (yes, Captain Obvious has spoken!).
Now, as for Israel & the West Bank, they don't get a whole lot of rainfall..mostly because it's a DESERT.
And my profession has spent decades studying the best way to purify water. Those pharmaceutical and manufacturing plants commonly purify their water outflows so much they are often MORE pure than the water inflow.
And, yes, it does require energy to perform, but it doesn't have to be from burning fossil fuels. They usually use electricity so a significant fraction of it comes from nuclear reactors.
Now, go rant on nuclear reactors for all the good it'll do ya, rofl.
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How much of that 1.5 tonnes of water is filtered and then reused? I would say that it's more cost effective to reuse that water.
So while 1.5 tonnes of water is used per machine, most of that water would be used multiple times.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not the responsiblity of the user, as I probably stole them anyway
>Manufacturing 1 PC Takes 1.8 Tons Of Raw Material
Big deal... Besides, everyone knows it takes
10 tons of manure to produce a U.N. report.
I had a 17" monitor I bought in about 1994, and only had to get rid of it about a year ago (I probably could have had it fixed, but it was cheaper to buy a working second-hand one). I currently have a 19" monitor that's probably about 10 years old, and perfect (I scored it cheap from work because they were about to dispose of it). They certainly last longer than 5 years.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
I have a collection (boxes) of good components for building respectable PCs (hard drives, CD-roms, cables, sound cards, ram) that aren't necessarily worth auctioning on eBay, but not worth throwing out if someone can use them. Does anyone one know of an organization that accepts parts and rebuilds PCs for schools or charities? I knew of one a few years ago but can't find it on Google now. Thanks in advance.
I STILL use my Mag DX15F on one of my computers. It's the first monitor I ever owned, and I bought it back in '95, and while the casing has yellowed quite a bit with age, the picture looks almost as good as it was then, except for a vertical line on one side of the screen when it boots up, which you can't notice when it finishes booting. Incidentally, the line showed up after some incorrect monitor settings during my first foray with Redhat 5.1.
If Mag made all their monitors as hardy as this one, they probably wouldn't be as profitable.
knee-jerk reactionary thought processes you'd expect from sheep
Maybe you'd better get out and find some nature to get close too. Sheep are not knee-jerk reactionaries. They are well known for not being reactionary. They are famous for it.
First, your units are wrong. It's 1500 kgs. That's almost 3000 pounds. A metric ton is 1000 kilograms.
Second, the water used in the manufacturing process isn't water. It's solutions. When they etch the boards, they use a high-concentration acid. While most of the fluid is H20, the "working" portion is nasty, nasty, nasty, NASTY stuff. You cannot simply reclaim the solution and get the water. That's the same as saying that you can trap the fumes from a car, process the fumes, and get gasoline.
Once, in my first-year chemistry lab, I was playing around after the lab (with supervision) and ended up making something so toxic that they had to fly someone in to figure out how to dispose of the mess I'd made. It might have been "mostly water", but there was no way to reclaim the H20 portion.
Computers generate an enormous amount of waste. Making them makes waste. Using them makes waste. Getting rid of them makes waste. It's not "eco-BS", it's a fact.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
is only about 10%. 1000 KGs = 2200 lbs. 240 kg (or 528 lbs) is actually MORE than 1/4 of an American (short) ton.
Apparently slashdot readers are so dumb that not only do they need to be reminded that a metric ton is 1000 kg but also that a kg = 2.2 lbs and a standard American ton is 2000 lbs.
But not the part you were looking at. True 1.5 m^3 weighs about 1.5 tons, but the part where he was off was when he said only a bathtub or two full. 1.5 m^3 is about 400 gallons. A 5 foot tub 30 inches wide holds about 50 Gallons, so 1.5 tons of water fills about 8 bathtubs. Have you ever carried a 5 gallon bucket of water. It's heavy. Does it really surprise you that 8 bathtubs full would weigh 1.5 tons. Just for another reference, 400 gallons is a little more water than you would find in a 7-8 person hot tub. That's quite a bit of water.
Rainfall rate is one small element in the hydrological cycle. The most critical part of fresh water supply is storage, and we have been draining the best storage reserves of all, aquifers, at an alarming rate. Obviously, you have not looked at the situation in India or Africa recently. Many aquifers there are drained almost past the point of possible extraction. In the US, the Olgalla aquifer is nearing the end of its usefulness. I forecast a radical drop in property prices within many of the parched interior states over the next generation or so. Now, as for Israel & the West Bank, they don't get a whole lot of rainfall..mostly because it's a DESERT.
While it's true that they receive quite low levels of rainfall, those regions are better described as "arid mediterranean", rather similar to mid-south California. Given their high population densities, the decision by Israel to grab two-thirds of the scarce, available fresh water in the occupied territories for their colonies is bound to cause friction. But possibly more boneheaded is inducing Intel to operate enormous fabs there, consuming billions of gallons of water annually. And New Mexico! rant on nuclear reactors for all the good it'll do ya
Also a non-renewable resource. Even assuming we move to lithium-catalysed fusion energy sources, there is only approximately as much lithium in the lithosphere as uranium.
Da Blog
a forecast from you is as good as gold
The history of empires in the full flush of youth expanding because of population pressure and an excess of capital into marginal lands through extensive irrigation projects that eventually fail is as old as urbanism. Look up Sumeria or the Maya sometime. Or check this:
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
Da Blog
Ummm, illegal immigration really wouldn't be considered "accepted immigration", would it? And statistics for that kind of thing are notoriously inaccurate, besides...
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
Even without including illegal immigration, the rate in the U.S. is higher.
That's partly what I value most about Slashdot - the informed debate, the subtle use of logic, the marshalling of facts and stats to substantiate assertions or denials. Do you actually know anything about how farming works in the US? Do you know how much energy input every kernal of corn requires? I think not... It really seems like you're talking out of your ass.
That's partly what I value most about Slashdot - the informed debate, the subtle use of logic, the marshalling of facts and stats to substantiate assertions or denials. Do you actually know anything about how farming works in the US? Do you know how much energy input every kernal of corn requires? I think not... http://www.cedar.at/mailarchives/infoterra/2003/m
Da Blog
Considering that I'm still alive and not burnt to a crisp
You can hold a pound of TNT in your hands. The temperature will remain ambient and this tells you nothing about the potential energy ueld. Likewise, you can lift a bag of nitrogen-based fertiliser and check its temperature, but this still tells you nothing about its potential energy yield. And again for a gallon of petrol/gasoline.
In all cases, your recommendation to measure the potential energy yield (and by extension, estimate the energy inputs required to create the compounds) by a simple temperature check is a basic science error I might expect from an 8-year-old, but I would grade very badly coming from anyone aged 12 or over.
And by the way, your total energy output for the Sun ignores the real value of the quantity of solar energy intercepted by the Earth, and the efficiency of the conversion of this solar energy into carbon compounds. This is the NPP or Net Primary Productivity of the Earth's ecology and a far more interesting, and difficult number to calculate, than facile numbers relating to the rate of fusion in the sun's core. Follow some of the links, you may learn something.
Da Blog
thermodynamics
Da Blog
You failed my test
Your statement of the 2nd law in vague generalities is next to useless. It's really all about ergodics - the 2nd law falls out of the Gibbs relation by considering both the ergodic nature of the time spent in local regions of the microstate phase space or, alternatively, by considering that quantum collapse during measurement will tend to increase the entropy of the macro ensemble.
You failed my test a long time ago. A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing.
Da Blog
derived by Boltzmann and ridiculed by people like you. He committed suicide because of the pressure
Interesting, I can't ever recall publicly ridiculing dear Ludwig. Maybe in another life?
I always thought he killed himself in that particularly selfish, cruel, and public way in front of his wife and daughter because he suffered from lifelong bipolar disorder.
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