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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."
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
I don't like the message because it sounds like United Nations "we have nothing to do so we'll invent some work" bullshit.
Where are the facts? Like, how much of the 1.5 tons is water? Let's take water out of the equation and compare everything else - and then get the statistics on other goods. Like how many tons to build a car, television, radio, microwave, etc.
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.
Yup, I have to concur, doctor. Its all very nice to say it costs you X amount of water, for instance - but water isn't exactly lost is it? I mean, its going to find its way back into the system via evaporation etc. "Not. Bloody. Likely." Indeed.
Funny that - I am an environmentalist because our children shouldnt have to clean up our shit.
We dont need mahogony trim in our cars - but we do need mahogony forests to absorb the pollution our cars create.
Also- dont equate environmentalists with the NIMBY bastards who moan about the eyesore on the Horizon. when its that or a Fossil/Nuke solution and where are they gonna build that?
anyhow - you are oprobably just trolling
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
Isn't that a false economy though?
I'd imagine if we're really caring about the energy usage, etc, it's better to scrap the old machine and get a new one with lower power consumption, and better a energy saving mode
1.5 tons is 1.5 cubic meters of water, which is only about a bath tub full (or two, depending on the size).
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.
Kid, keep your hands out of your monitor; especially if you don't know anything about them!
There's probably 25,000V to 30,000V driving the CRT plus a 500V preamp.
If your monitor goes replace it. Period.
If you're emotionally attached to it take it to a qualified repair facility.
A few things you might want to consider...
Bottomline, what you propose is unrealistic and very dangerous. If you have issues with the UN, and there are definitely some areas where you should have issues, then work on getting it fixed.
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.
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)
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.
"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
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
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"
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