computers and their environmental impact

March 17, 2004 00:40 +0000 | Nifty Links Society & Culture 1

and i thought styrofoam was wasteful. according to a new United nations study, "the construction of an average 24 kilogram computer and 27 centimetre monitor requires at least 240 kilograms of fossil fuel, 22 kilograms of chemicals and 1,500 kilograms of water - or 1.8 tons in total". that's obscene.

some have suggested that a possible way to slow down this process is to "repeal moore's law" (a currently working theroy that states (roughly) that computer speeds will double every six months) by way of legislation. presonally, i think that's the dumbest thing i've ever heard. yes the computers are wasteful, but you can't go around making laws that they should be intentionally slower. industry and the consumer base won't stand for it.

personally i'd suggest the following:

legislation to reduce the number of harmful chemicals used in these things
increasing the cost of energy to it's real levels
persuing more viable forms of energy production in the areas of solar, wind, biomass and geothermal energy

but that's just me on my soapbox.

Comments

daniel
17 Mar 2004, 6:18 a.m. |

in response to my own posting, i should mention that i sent this same information to a geek mailinglist i'm on and got the following response from my buddy barc:

The real problem with that currently is what "more environmentally friendly components"? Computers are very complex beasts. At the end of the day, we build them this way because it's the only way to do it. With a car, you can build an engine from iron, aluminium, steel, or if you want to get exotic, ceramic. A chip you can build from aluminium or copper, via lithography and acid etching, or via lithography and acid etching, or via lithography and acid etching. There is no other way to do it, except to go backwards and have people assemble "CPUs" out of transistors on breadboards the size of dinner trays and have hundreds of interconnects instead of millions, with a commensurate decrease in performance.

Resources are not cheap for doing this, nor are raw materials, and believe me, the hardware industry eternally skates on the razor edge of profitability. If there was a better (less costly) way to do something, you bet your ass they'd already be all over it. AMD and Intel are eternally trying to figure out how to squeeze more processors out of the same wafer plates (more processors per plate, less material used), as are everyone else in the semiconductor industry. Organic LED displays show great promise for replacing the new LCD screens but they're still several years off. LCDs themselves are a great improvement, waste-wise, over CRTs. It's getting better all the time as a result of people's desire to improve the technology and sell it cheaper.

As far as energy waste goes, we're getting better with that. There's still the rabid minority who always want better, faster, stronger computers, but for the rest of the computing folk, 1GHz and 256 MB of RAM is more than enough computer for what they need. Some manufacturers like VIA have boards and chips that draw sweet fuck all for power. For example, go here: http://www.mini-itx.com Most of those systems are based on VIAs Nehemiah 1GHz chip and board combo that draws something under 12 watts of power at full-tilt. One guy set up a beowulf cluster of them: http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/ 12 boards, runs 60 watts for everything at idle, and only 200 watts with everything loaded fully. However each of these boards only puts out like a Celeron 600 would. Tradeoffs...

the only response i'd have to this is that while i have the utmost confidence in the industry to find cheaper ways of making processors, i very much doubt they're interested in finding an environmentally friendly way of doing it. but it really is an excellent post to balance out the articles.