This is just one of a series of sobering images from the largest electronic waste processing site on earth. Needless to say, it’s in China.
Thanks to Andrew Ingram for the link.
Category Archives: Environmental issues
Professor Mackay’s Illuminations
The classic visual PowerPoint cliche to indicate inspiration is to draw a light bulb over someone’s head. Physicist David Mackay’s inspired idea was that the humble light bulb would provide a graphic way of communicating to non-physicists the scale of the energy gap now facing our society.
We asked David to be the external assessor for our new Open University course on Energy Measurements at Home partly on the basis of his terrific book Sustainable Energy — without the hot air. But we had no idea then that he would be appointed Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change. It’s clear that he made the video before he knew it either. Wonder how his political masters are getting on with such a clear thinker — and speaker. I suspect they are finding it, well, slightly uncomfortable. Speaking truth to power is generally not appreciated, and I can’t see Professor Mackay trimming to the wind. Someone once accused him of being against wind turbines. He replied: “I’m not against anything. But I am for arithmetic.”
Universal phone charger approved
From BBC NEWS.
A new mobile phone charger that will work with any handset has been approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations body.
Industry body the GSMA predicts that 51,000 tonnes of redundant chargers are generated each year.
Currently most chargers are product or brand specific, so people tend to change them when they upgrade to a new phone.
However, the new energy-efficient chargers can be kept for much longer.
The GSMA also estimates that they will reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by 13.6m tonnes.
About time too. Now for digital camera chargers…
Thanks to James Miller for spotting it.
Ecofont
One of my colleagues has estimated that our university department could save nearly £17,000 a year on toner if we all simply used a special font for our laser-printed documents. He’s probably right, but it sure brings on a tussle between one’s aesthetic sensibility and one’s environmental ‘conscience’. But maybe it’s not so bad in small sizes. Only one way to find out…
What climate change looks like
Greener cloud computing? I wonder
Energy consumption from data centers doubled between 2000 and 2005–from 0.5 percent to 1 percent of world total electricity consumption. That figure, which currently stands at around 1.5 percent, is expected to rise further. According to a study published in 2008 by the Uptime Institute, a datacenter consultancy based in Santa Fe, NM, it could quadruple by 2020.
“Having energy consumption go from one to three percent in five to ten years, if that goes on, we are in big trouble,” says Kenneth Brill, Uptime Institute executive director. Unless this growth is checked, greenhouse gas emissions will rise, and “the profitability of corporations will deteriorate dramatically,” he adds.
Hmmm… Not sure about the profitability angle, but the environmental issue is a real one. According to this report, Yahoo is now taking it seriously.
At any rate, its new datacentre near Buffalo, NY, includes buildings oriented to take advantage of the breeze coming off Lake Erie, with cupolas to vent hot air from racks of servers. Operators only have to switch on air-conditioning when outside temperature rises above 27 degrees.
GM’s Volt: cost-benefit analysis
GM is claiming that its forthcoming electric car, the Volt, will do 230 mpg. Amazing, if true. But it will cost $40,000. Writing in The Atlantic, Daniel Indiviglio reported on some calculations to see how long he’d have to drive a Toyota Corolla before he’d have recouped the purchase price of the Volt.
The price difference in 2011 between the Volt and Corolla should be approximately $24,189. Next, I figured out how much it would cost to drive a mile in each car. That’s around 11.9 cents per mile for the Corolla and 1.3 cents per mile for the Volt. Thus, it’s around 10.6 cents more expensive per mile to drive the Corolla.
From this point, it’s pretty simple. Just divide the price difference by how much more per mile it costs to drive the Corolla. That tells us that you would need to drive the Volt approximately 229,000 miles before you break even for paying more to buy it.
Clearly, my methodology takes a few short cuts. Each year you drive the Volt, the price of gasoline may continue to increase. So the number would likely be a little less. For example, if you assume $4 per gallon, then you’d need to drive around 177,000 miles to break even.
There’s a little more help that Volt drivers will get — from Uncle Sam. There will be a government rebate of $7,500 available when you buy a Volt. That lowers its potential price tag to $32,500, reducing the difference in 2011 prices between the Volt and Corolla to $16,689. As a result, you would need to drive approximately 158,000 miles to break even, based on my other original assumptions.
158,000 miles is still a lot. Unless the price of gas truly skyrockets well past the $3 level after 2011, then the argument for purchasing a Volt will remain based more on environmental ethics than economics. That is unless you drive cars for a really, really long time.
Cabinet Office’s IT pushes out 401 tonnes of CO2. No figure for the hot air
Interesting story in The Register.
Tom Watson Civil Service Minister at the Cabinet Office outlined his department’s efforts to reduce CO2 emissions in a Commons answer yesterday. He said the department last year used “929 000 kWh of electricity at a cost of £61 000 for its IT Services”. This equated to 401 tonnes of CO2. Desktops accounted for 420 000 kWh, printing 195 000kWh and the rest was down to its datacentre. Asked what the department was doing to reduce greenhouse emissions, he reeled out a series of stock measures including reducing the number of printers and replacing them with greener multifunction devices, putting monitors into standby, shutting down PCs after hours using power management kit, offloading redundant kit and “starting to replace existing servers with storage area networking devices that implement storage virtualisation.”
Sounds like a beanfeast for government suppliers — except that at the same time he announced that “the lifecycle of all end user devices has been extended to five years” and “the number of PCs and laptops will be reduced to as close to one per person as possible”. At the same time “thin client technology will be used with low-power consumption CPUs server technology that complies with the recommendations in the Greening Government ICT Strategy.”
Actually, this Parliamentary Answer sets a helpful precedent. It’d be good to see companies as well as public bodies starting to account for their carbon footprints. And even if I were an accountant who’s entirely unmoved about climate change I’d be very interested in the fact that my organisation used nearly a million units of electricity in a year.
At last — common sense on phone chargers
The GSM Association announced this week that its members have agreed to settle on a single, standard charger design for all cellphones — MicroUSB — and will aim for January 1, 2012 as the deadline.
Hooray! But why not 2009?
Googling vs boiling (contd)
From Nicholas Carr’s Blog.
Still, the numbers add up. Google says "the average car driven for one kilometer … produces as many greenhouse gases as a thousand Google searches." That means that the billion searches Google is estimated to do a day are equivalent to driving a car about a million kilometers. And that doesn't include the energy used to power the PCs of the people doing the searches, which Google says is greater than the power it uses.