The Green IT movement has lost the plot

[EmptyTimCup]

The Green IT movement has lost the plot
E-waste, and not energy conservation, is what really matters


While energy efficiency is recommended business hygiene, the total energy consumption of IT hardware is not a serious societal problem. Most estimates suggest that all of the world's data centers, PCs and networks consume between 1.5% and 3% of the world's energy. While precise measurements are always difficult, does anyone seriously doubt that the IT-enabled energy savings stemming from e-commerce, telecommuting, teleconferencing, digital newspapers, virtual offices, smart buildings, smart products, etc. aren't enough to offset this? For much more on assessing and measuring the energy implications of applied IT, see our latest research.

The iPhone alone has eliminated most of my needs for cameras, address books, reference books, newspapers, maps, guides, CD players, clocks, watches and, eventually, land lines, radios, credit cards and even PCs. Given the implicit energy savings, the electricity used by the actual device is a second-order sustainability issue at most.

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We have identified seven main reasons why society's green IT priorities have been so skewed toward energy consumption and away from the increasingly pressing e-waste challenge:

1. The risks of global warming/climate change have made energy use and related emissions the core of the environmental movement, effectively crowding out other concerns.
2. In developed economies, the cost of extracting toxic substances from retired electronic products substantially exceeds the resulting value, making it an unattractive business, usually moved offshore.
3. Governments have been reluctant to seriously regulate the fast-moving, prosperous and influential IT industry, especially in the U.S. and Asia.
4. Keeping the market's emphasis on reducing server and PC energy consumption is appealing to IT manufacturers as it helps convince customers to buy new equipment. Emphasizing the adverse effects of rapid obsolescence and e-waste would have the opposite effect.
5. IT customers have been advised that outsourcing recycling to a specialist firm is an industry best practice and have had little incentive or ability to assess what actually happens to various 'recycled' IT products.
6. The public remains largely uninformed and apathetic, especially outside of Europe. Many people simply don't realize there is anything wrong with throwing out old IT products in their everyday bagged trash.
7. Buying more energy-efficient computers is relatively easy. But there is no simple way to build toxin-free computers or safely retire today's toxin-dependent systems.​

For these reasons, much of the IT community has turned a blind eye toward some truly appalling global practices and conditions, with the developing world too often used as an e-waste dumping ground, often harming the poorest of nations and people. This problem is only getting worse, as the number of devices built, sold and thrown away rapidly increases. While there is no quick fix, recasting the sustainability debate is an essential starting point.

 

[Mongo53]

Note: I finally heard a news story about the Set Top Boxes (STB) that the Cable Companies have all switched to and the Satellite companies have been using as well.

They are huge power hogs that barely reduce consumption when they go to sleep and they do NOT turn off, when you switch them off they just go to sleep.

If you ever felt the heat coming off them, you'd be able to tell they are consuming a lot of power.

There are some of the smaller, basic units from the cable companies, that just give you the base subscription channels that are fairly low power consumption, but still a lot more than it should be.

Satellite STB, that unfortaetly is unavoidable, the way the technology works requires high power consumption (the STB powers the Dish, and its super high freq and necessary signal conversion).

The Cable companies, its purely their Proprietary Schemes to force consumers into paying more for less service and hoc additional services to them. Any TV made in the last dozen years will work fine with digital cable.

Yes, the Cable companies do have security concerns, they had 14 years to work with the TV industry to come up with a solution, and Congress passed a law basically saying they couldn't use STB's to do it. The Cable Companies blew it, and then sued the gov saying STB's were the only way they could do it, and got a waiver to use them.