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."

Comments

Huh what?

[autopr0n]

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.

Re:Huh what?

[Eivind]

That is true. Saying that 1500 liters of water gets "used" in the process of making a PC is pretty useless as an indicator of ecological impact.

To be able to say something about that, you'd have to quantify how much that water got contaminated, and with what substances, what treatment it gets before it again gets released somewhere, and how and when it eventually gets re-released.

If I start cutting granite using diamond-blades, and cools them by flushing with water from the nearby river, I'll probably "consume" enormous amounts of water, but if I let the water go into a pool where most of the dust will settle, and then back in the river, the negative ecological impact will be truly minimal.

Much more interesting than how many liters of waters go trough my plant is instead what contamination, if any, goes into the water before it's again released. In my example that amounts to "some amount of granite-dust which mostly settles in the pool before release, and ain't *that* dangerous to begin with".

In the case of PC-manufacture, there's obviously some amount of more harmful chemical also being released. That is something we should look at, and do our very best at minimizing.

I just don't see how this "1800kg" metric is useful for anything at all, least of all for measuring environmental impact.

Re:Huh what?

[Genda]

There are several interesting points here.

The first point of interest is that industrial use of fresh water only accounts for about 15% total water consumption in this country. Use by public consumption, such as home lawns and golf courses, wasteful water use practices (long hard showers, washing small loads of clothes or dishes without selecting proper water settings, etc.) account for over 35%. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't improve the practice of making our industries more green. It does mean that the best place to start impacting water consumption as a whole is our own homes and public landscaping.

The next interesting point involves the quickly changing technology surrounding computers. In the near future, technical breakthroughs in OLED films, and high density storage, should allow us to reduce the physical size, weight, and composition of computers, dramatically reducing their environmental impact. In fact, using green sources for the feedstock to make computer hardware, and new technology for recycling old hardare, could reduce the power and resource consumption of PC manufacture by 50%-75%. This will result in saving hundreds of billions of tons of water anually.

The last interesting issue, is that water consumption is not actually the issue. Or at least not directly. The issue has never been the direct consumption of water so much as it's been moving water from places that have to places that don't. Every one of those tons of water has a huge cost in fuel needed to transport it from source to spiggot. Add up the cost both economic and environmental for the maintainance and upkeep of the delivery infrastructure, and you're beginning to look at a serious expense for doing business. With the depletion of western aquifers, set against the stiff competition for water for agrobusiness, and the growing population in arid regions (read that as an unprecedented need for water in places that have none of their own to quench a thirsty populace), and the clear and urgent need to conserve a shrinking resource becomes self evident. In the near future, any sane business program will include the environmental cost, because in the end, we all pick up the tab for maintaining an environment that is sufficiently healthy to support basic human endeavors.

Genda

-- Not only is lunch not free, it seems that the conflicting interests in our country have found ways to make you pay for it more than once...

When will people get it?

[Repran]

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!

But what about Macs, they last longer ...

[kiwipeso]

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 ?

Re:But what about Macs, they last longer ...

[Jarnis]

You calling Apple enviromentally sound? The same Apple that makes IPODs with a battery that cannot be replaced without shipping the whole ipod to a service center and back? Not to mention the new 'mini ipod' which has 'disposable' written all over it...

Want to fix the 'disposable' economy? Outlaw ridiculously short (90 day, 6 month) warranties and force - by consumer protection law - the manufacturers to make sure their stuff is *durable* by forcing them to replace it at no cost if it fails within the expected lifecycle of the product. End result is better, more durable products with only a slightly higher pricetag.

Its not really 1.8 Metric Tonnes

[Hungus]

According to the first Paragraph of the article 1.5 of the 1.8 Tonnes is water or roughtly 83.3% of the amount listed. I do agree its pretty obscene the amount of fuel that goes into the manufacturing process however (240kg of fuel). I would also stand behind the articles point of

"donating the old computer so that it may continue to be used offer potential energy savings of between five and 20 times those gained by recycling"

So what can be done curb this kind of thing? Well I for one would suggest some of the following:

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

Re:Let's turn this around for a minute

[puffing_billy69]

80% of the raw material used to manufacture a PC is pure water! Water that can be recycled!

And I'm sure you're familiar with all of the processes involved in turning the water back into its pristine state we began with.

Why, they could surely just pipe the water from the factory outlet back into the factory inlet, right?

I think you might be overlooking something, son. It isn't just shite & piss we're talking about here. Hundreds of different kinds of contaminations, many involving heavy metals.

Yes, I agree completely with you about numbers and statistics, but I don't think the impact of any amount of water contamination, or the effect if it being released unpurified, is seen by you here.

Re:Apologies for my cynicism but...

[gtrubetskoy]

1.5 tons of water?

1.5 tons is 1.5 cubic meters of water, which is only about a bath tub full (or two, depending on the size).

PC industry needs to change

[Junks Jerzey]

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.