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."

Make me feel good...

that I haven't bought a monitor in seven years and have fished several out of the garbage. Using a KVM switch is helpful too.

Re:Make me feel good...

Sadly, the cost of a single KVM switch is around 1/8th of the rainforest.

You monster!

Re:Make me feel good...

A CRT will ware out in about five years. Brightness and contrast will decrease to a level which is unacceptable.

You can increase the brightness again by pumping up the voltage level on your tube, but that will only increase the rate of detoriation.

Re:Make me feel good...

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.

Re:Make me feel good...

The way I was taught was to ground the metal tip of a screwdriver, and hold onto the insulated end and let it probe around the coils on the back of the CRT and such. Expect sparks. BIG ones.

You were taught wrong. Shorting out caps like that is a good way to destroy them, especially electrolytics. The proper way is a big resister, preferably 5 - 10 watt, about 50 ohm, on the end of a plastic rod. That way you drain the caps without damaging them, your eyes, or your screwdriver.

Pros/Cons

A CRT will ware out in about five years. Brightness and contrast will decrease to a level which is unacceptable.

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?

Mostly refining raw materials

Just making the metal for the case will use a *lot* of water, for coolant etc. You'd be amazed - in some countries, up to and beyond 100 tons of water can be used to make a ton of steel.

Most of the fossil fuels are probably mostly used in various refining materials process - the case, again, a lot of power needed for that. All the different materials in the PC and monitor adds up amazingly fast - remember that the actual raw materials are really cheap, so you don't see much cost due to this when you buy something in a high-street store.

-Chris

Re:Mostly refining raw materials

> The amount of water required to make a ton of steel is less than, equal to, or greater than 100 tons.

Incredible. And that's not all. In China, the amount of water it takes just to cook a single grain of rice is less than, equal to, or greater than all the water in the Pacific Ocean!!!

And in India, the amount of water used by a single red chili, from seedling to mature pepper, would be enough to, or not enough to, or more than enough to dwarf the planet Jupiter!!!!!

We should get these bar stewards before they destroy the entire Universe!!!!!!!

Order of magnitude..

OK, so it wasn't very percise; it was intended as an order-of-magnitude figure, because after some googling, everywhere seems to disagree on usage. Several reports cite 30-50 tons water / ton steel in China; 5-6 tons water/ton steel in the USA and Japan due to higher tech and more regulation; another couple cite 'a ton of steel can take 280 tons of water', though this sounds doubtful in comparison to the others. An Indian report cites up to 300 tons.

Google for "ton of steel" "tons of water".

-Chris

Re:Apologies for my cynicism but...

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).

Re:Apologies for my cynicism but...

Wow, I doubted your numbers as first but they look like they're right. (1.5 tons of water ~= 1.36 m3)

Water is pretty damn heavy.

Tonnes

1m^3 has a mass of exactly 1 Tonne (Metric) by definition

1m^3 = 1.102 Short (US) Tons

1m^3 = 0.984 Long (Old UK) Tons

I'm amazed to see ppl on /. surprised at the weight of water. Over here in Europe where we use the metric system it's common knowledge 1000Kg=1Tonne=1m^3 as it's so easy to remember.

Using up the oceans to make computers

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. :-(

Thirsty?

Wow, now I don't have to feel bad about running the tap for a couple seconds before filling my glass....

Re:Thirsty?

Actually, you should run the tap in any place with older plumbing. Some study showed that most of the lead leached into the standing water in the pipes is concentrated in the first water coming from the tap.

Re:Thirsty?

But the lead is what gives it its sweet tangy goodness! Plus it help builds strong bones! (or is that adamantium?)

While I like the message...

I have this odd feeling that they are neglecting how much it would cost to make the second PC and monitor; how much of the material cost is simply overhead?

Re:While I like the message...

Yes, this definitely falls into the "lies, damned lies and statistics box." They are claiming it takes 240 kilograms of fossil fuels to create a 17" CRT that currently sells for $125. Now, coal is about the cheapest fossil fuel out there and it costs about $30 per metric ton of coal. So, that's $7.50 in the price of a 17" CRT just for coal. Now, in that $7.50 1/4 metric ton of coal, there are 5.1 million BTUs of energy. Comparatively, total annual energy consumption per capita is about 250 million BTUs. So, does it really strike you as plausible that the fossil fuel energy required to make your CRT is 2% of your consumption? That is to say, if you have 5 monitors (I do), that's equal an entire month of your total energy consumption? As a comparison, it takes about 250 kilos of gasonline to drive from Los Angeles to New York City. So, they are positing that it takes as much energy to produce a CRT as to propel 1.5 tons of metal and flesh 2800 miles at 70mph. Not. Bloody. Likely.

Re:While I like the message...

240 kg is not 1/4 of a tonne

A metric ton - which is what he explicitly said - is 1000kg. So 240kg is near as dammit 1/4 of a ton.

Re:While I like the message...

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.

Re:While I like the message...

"Yes, this definitely falls into the "lies, damned lies and statistics box." They are claiming it takes 240 kilograms of fossil fuels to create a 17" CRT that currently sells for $125. Now, coal is about the cheapest fossil fuel out there and it costs about $30 per metric ton of coal. So, that's $7.50 in the price of a 17" CRT just for coal. Now, in that $7.50 1/4 metric ton of coal, there are 5.1 million BTUs of energy. Comparatively, total annual energy consumption per capita is about 250 million BTUs. So, does it really strike you as plausible that the fossil fuel energy required to make your CRT is 2% of your consumption? That is to say, if you have 5 monitors (I do), that's equal an entire month of your total energy consumption? As a comparison, it takes about 250 kilos of gasonline to drive from Los Angeles to New York City. So, they are positing that it takes as much energy to produce a CRT as to propel 1.5 tons of metal and flesh 2800 miles at 70mph. Not. Bloody. Likely."

What do you mean? An African or European CRT?

Re:While I like the message...

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.

Re:While I like the message...

It is too bad. That every New PC I find uses more power then my old one.
My 486 150watt Power Supply
My P200 250watt Power Supply
A P4 350watt Power Supply

Unless you upgrade from a PC to a laptop you don't really have a a good saving in power.

Huh what?

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?

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?

I gave an example that perfectly illustrated what I meant. If you failed to read it, or failed to comprehend it, it's not my damn fault.

Point is, contaminating water *is* a problem, simply "using" it in some sense or other, normally isn't. Every time I take a swim in the local lake you could argue that I "use" thousands of cubic meter. That doesn't imply the ecological impact is much above zero.

Re:Huh what?

The world has plenty of fresh water - it is just not in the right places, and it is very wexpensive to shift. Wateraid and similar organisations are trying to get relatively small amounts of clean water to places where there is very little water indeed. By contrast, Canada has thousands of times more fresh water thanit will ever need for drinking and agriculture. Aside from the pollution question, ther is no harm in Canada "wasting" a bit of its fresh water. The same water consumption would be criminal in Namibia.

Re:Huh what?

The same thing about the world is also true about Canada - in most towns and cities there are the typical restrictions about watering lawns, etc., and occasional water shortages. That's why there are concerns about U.S. companies trying to force Canada to agree to sell water under NAFTA - they're not going to be taking the immense amounts of water up in the N.W.T. that will never see a human being before it washes into the sea, but water closer to the border that the cities might need. The idea of paying for access to your own water - that has been guaranteed to Americans under some ridiculous NAFTA contract - isn't very appealing.

Re:Huh what?

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".

But don't forget that heat can be a contaminant. Water's ability to carry dissolved oxygen decreases significantly as its temperature increases. With your granite-cutting example this wouldn't be a problem (unless you were running hundreds of cutters, or a single monolithic one), but it's a real problem with power plants, which often use water from a nearby river or lake to run their turbines. Warming a river or lake only a few degrees can have a huge impact on the organisms that live within it, due to the decrease in available oxygen.

Heat is a VERY big contaminant!

Mod that baby up. Dumping energy into a water stream has a massive impact on the surrounding ecology.

I'm sure most of the US people have heard of the manatees- the power plants in Florida have discharge channels that are long and wide and attract hundreds of the 'sea cows' each year. Why? Because the water being returned (reclaimed) comes out quite a bit warmer than the water it's going back into.

This translates to a literal calving ground of protected, tempered water. The plants even run a little tourist center for people to come in and watch the manatees - heh there's even a little hose that drops 'fresh' water into the discharge channel. Watch the creatures pull up under it and drink from a 'novel' non-salt containing water.... I think it gets them drunk, but then again if you've watched a manatee swim you'll swear they are all drunk.

But in this case the energy return is quite benefitial to the surroundings. Usually it's not- think of the Alaskan pipeway that draws heated oil from the wells to distribution. That permafrost underneath NEEDS to be kept cold, yet we are radiating millions of therms of energy above it to keep the oil from freezing solid. So it's a complete tradeoff in that sense- the coldest environment that MUST stay cold has the hottest (And capable of generating the most heat) mere meters above it. I think the pipes are about 2.5m off the ground, to allow animals to pass thru.

The dissolved O2 problem is real, but not as big as you think. I'd place more issue around the extra few degrees in the winter than on the amount of O2 present (algae can have a more devastating effect from phosphate dumping)

Re:Huh what?

We're not talking about doing the dishes here - the manufacture of microprocessors require huge amounts of water to wash the residue off of the wafers during the photolithography process.
Like darkroom photography, this involves the use of potentially noxious chemicals.
Now, the report is quite sketchy on what all that water is used for and that is, IMO, a glaring omission. But, suffice to say that the water leaving a chip fab probably won't be classed as safe drinking water.
Here are some links:
http://www.svtc.org/media/articles/2003/benzene_ny t_1117.htm
http://home.aigonline.com/AIGEnvironmental/ind_pro file/read_profile/1,1990,NDUtL0FJR0Vudmlyb25tZW50Y WwvSW5kdXN0cnlfSXNzdWVzLUluZHVzdHJpZXMgd2l0aCBFbnZ pcm9ubWVudGFsIElzc3Vlcw==,00.html

Re:Huh what?

Here they aren't saying anything about the water, but are implying it is 'removed' or 'used up' which is nonsense. It goes somewhere, and probably very near the original 1.3 tons is output as water. What is very important, as mentioned earlier on, is what happens to it, and how effective decontamination is.

Ideally it is still going to it's original destination , valley basin or whatever, just rerouted along the way.

Re:Huh what?

If you don't understand why its important to answer these two questions, then you're not qualified to determine whether something is or isn't 'ecologically' sound.

Then, based on your reasoning, noone is qualified to determine whether something is or isn't 'ecologically' sound.

You can give me an example of where water is being misused and I can give you an example of where water is being used wisely, but in the end, those are just examples and we have no idea what's really happening to *all* that water.

It's really easy to point fingers and say "what if", "what if", and "what if", but in the end you are just as clueless as all of us.

Re:Huh what?

Yes, but the point that many people are trying to make is that the water isn't just 'gone'. It's still around. The article doesn't tell what happens to it, or if it's usable after the fact.

If you make a PC, and use 1.5 tons of water, but after the fact 1.49 tons are put back into the environment, uncontaminated, how much have you really used?

Yes, there is some impact, but it means that the way these guys are painting the picture is hardly the end of the story.

I don't trust ecologists who rail against technology. If they want to study a situation and offer solutions to the problem (hey, if you do this, you will only use 1.1 tons of water), then I'm all ears. But to just say how bad it is that we are using so much material just for one PC is misleading (as some one else said, what about the 2nd PC), as well as nearly useless. I say nearly, because I recognize that without this, no one would even know there was a problem, and that is important.

I just wish they would offer a solution too.

Don't give me the "Feed starving children" line!

You were modded as 'insightful' for repeating the drivel on television?

1L at 1.04 g/cm^3 is a cube 10cm X 10cm X 10cm and weighs in at 1.04 kg. 1500L is a cube approximately 1.15m x 1.15m x 1.15m and weighs 1560kg.

Now you'd like to transport that 1500kg across the world to some poor, impoverished nation and give some thirsty children some water?

How would you like to accompish that? Maybe put it in a truck? Or a boat? Possibly an airplane? You might have to burn some fossil fuels to move it, unless of course you will be willing to pedal and move it by yourself (note, you will need cooling water yourself in order to maintain peak performance and prevent your brain from frying due to overheating).

This new-age drivel is very annoying to listen to. You would have a better chance of relocating the affected individuals to a more 'rich' environment.

Of course, using those computers to predict where hotspots will form is a bad thing- better to be surprised by a hurricane and lose the entire crop across an entire nation, than to 'consume' that 1500L of water. Let's exclude the fact that environmental regulations strictly control what can be returned to the water table, and that fines run into the 100K's for offenses.

Personally, I'd find it prettey interesting to watch you move 1560 kg of water using a bicycle to pull an oxen cart loaded with ~5 55gallon drums of water.

Facts vs Fiction

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.

Exactly.

How many "tons" of water do I use to shower? And I do that everyday. I certainly don't buy a computer everyday, however. You may as well consider the air and food consumed by the factory workers if you are forced to follow the causal trail so far to get the desired dramatic number. How many fossil fuels are used to till the fields that grow the crops that feed the workers that make the computers? Clearly, this is an ecological disaster. Our only option is to start killing people, or at least keep them from being born. That is where this trail of logic will eventually lead you.

Re:Exactly - human consumption of water

A typical adult will require two litres of water a day to remain healthy. That amount is recommended by survivalist guide both for outdoors and natural disasters.

Florida state has a web calculator [florida-water.com] for you to work out your total water consumption:

There's another one by South Central Texas Regional Water Planning Group [watershedexperience.com]

Upgrade doesn't have to mean replacement

I seen plenty of Dell P3's in offices that have dual cpu capabilitie but only 1 cpu installed. Yes P3's are hard to come by but instead of replacing all PC's in your business take out half. Put their CPU's and memories in the P3's you are keeping and voila. Very nice fast machines.

You can also do a lot with a simple memory upgrade.

This is after all the business market. Not the home user market. For office use a dual P3 is even better (with the right modern OS) then a single P4. No more lag while your wordproccessor starts up.

With such an upgrade you just doubled the life of the Mobo, memory, cpu, HD, expansion cards, cables and monitor. 50% reduction in waste. Not bad eh?

You got two kinds of water.

Drinkable and non-drinkable. The last is in plentifull supply. The first is not.

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?

Re:Huh what?

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?

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!

Check out the Alameda Computer Resource Center

For anyone in the Bay Area you might want to the check out the Alameda Computer Resource Center (ACCRC). They recycle just about anything electronic, but they also load up Linux on old computers and give them to schools, non-profits, and developing nations. Very cool organization. Located in Berkeley. www.accrc.org

Wake-on-LAN?

From the article:
"Too many computers at companies are prevented from entering their standby mode by LAN traffic, which keeps them awake and consuming power even while they are not in use, he said. ...Williams suggests redesigning network cards to allow the PC to go to sleep and then wake it should there be any important network traffic."

Hasn't that already been done in the form of Wake-on-LAN?

Re:Wake-on-LAN?

I've got one for ya.

I work in a LAN gaming center. Most of you have probably seen the type - lost of high end gaming pay-for-play comps loaded with CS, BF:1942, CoD, UT2k3, and a bunch of other acronyms. The power buttons on the cases are really inconvienient to get to (behind one of those door things, 5' off the floor, turned to the side so the case window faces out).

Hitting all those power buttons is NOT FUN. Not difficult, just annoying. So, being the compsci student I am, I wrote a litte C proggie that sends WOL packets out to any machine I want. Incorporate a small databse of the MAC's and a tidy front-end and voila - instant 'power-on' menu. It works well. I'm also going to write a small client-side app that allows me to turn them off remotely, just for fun.

Re:even tap water...

50 gallons?

You run your water through a double distiller or something?
For most municipal water supplies it goes like :
- Filter large crud and let dirt drop out of suspension
- Add a flocculant and coagulant to settle the fines (micron sized particles) to the bottom and drain them off.
- Chlorinate / UV treat the water.
- Pipe to home.

Whilst there is some loss from pumping the settled crud from the bottom of thickeners , it's nowhere near 50:1

Well, I hope I don't "upgrade" the wrong part...

OK, so I opt to upgrade my computer instead of buying a new one (which is the only thing I've ever done in the last 20 years of PC use).

What parts shouldn't I upgrade in order to be "environmentally friendly"? I'm sure the case doesn't take a hellacious amout of natural resources. I mean, it's just bending metal. The power supply is relatively simple electronics.

So, my guess is that the biggest consumers of resources are going to be the hard drive, the memory, the processor, and the motherboard.

Which are things I upgrade. Regularly.

I think environmental conservation is an important idea, but it seems like "Upgrade! Don't replace!" just gives the manufacturers a good excuse to not explore less environmentally hostile manufacturing techniques.

Having said all that, the beauty of water is that when you use it, you get to use it again. Yay water cycle. Makes planet work good.

Resources don't seem to matter much

Simply bending metal is I am afraid like saying meat comes from the supermarket. Last time I checked there where no metal sheet mines. It either has to be taken from ore wich is a gigantic process involving insane amounts of rock being boiled to extract tiny amounts of metal or recovered from scrap iron. Even the later still requires a lot of work to sort it all out (I am not even going to mention the costs of removing plastics and paint from the scrap iron) melt it down and get it into nice metal sheets for bending.

Still the case is probably the least wastefull. but also the least likely to be replaced in an upgrade. Why after all. For several generations of PC's it has been ATX motherboards so one size fits all. Power supply? Unless it is broken again why upgrade?

No the biggest offender is the MOBO. Countless different materials wich are difficult to recover and only yielding tiny amounts. Scrap the case and you got a few kilos of metal. Scrap a mother board and you are talking a few grams of sellable stuff. You can get paid for a truckload of cases, you will have to pay someone to scrap the mobos.

Mobo is a bastard for other reasons as well. The case can be used over multiple generations and so can stuff like the monitors and HD's. But with each new CPU generation you need a new MOBO.

Your last comment is so wrong that I think you really are someone who thinks meat comes from a supermarket?

Water that has been used can be used again? Not unless your into watersports.

Polluted water does not magically clean itself. Sure water polluted by going through humans and animals gets cleaned eventually after several years going throught the natural cycle. Same is not true for industrial polluted water. Heavy metals have a tendency to stick around in the water supply.

Yes water can be recycled but if you are an industry then you need to do it yourselve and this costs money. A lot of it. Best would be if factories used a closed cycle. However most do not and so the water is very much wasted. Unless you enjoy drinking water with the extra tang of lead and mercury.

Drinkable water is a resource that renews itself at a certain rate. Sadly we humans seem very capable of consuming it a greater rate. Luckily we are also capable of adding to the renewal process but this seems to only happen when people or companies are ordered at pain of fines to do this.

But what about Macs, they last longer ...

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 ...

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.

How does this compare?

It would be interesting to compare these numbers with the amount of raw material used to manufacture other household items etc, e.g. other electronics, furniture, refrigerators, cars, clothes, food. The figures are probably surprisingly high nomatter what you look at.

So yeah, recycling really is a good idea.

Linux-Ecology-HOWTO

Linux can be used as a means to protect our environment, by using its features to save power or paper, since it doesn't require big hardware it may be used with old computers to make their life cycle longer, games may be used in environmental education and software is available to simulate ecological processes. See a detailed description of this means in the Ecology-HOWTO [tuxmobil.org].

Upgrading uses resources too

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.

i've done my bit already..

i got an eeny weeny 14" CRT display.. :d

Check your local laws

In some states it's illegal to throw a PC or monitor into the garbage. I know in the county I live in there is a fine for dumping computer equipment because of the heavy metals and other hazmats involved, but I've never heard of anyone being arrested or fined or anything for it. There are companies that specialize in proper disposal, but of course it costs you money.

So anyway, even if natural resources don't mean shit to you and you don't want to sound like some save-the-world-with-idealism, tree-hugging liberal, it's a good idea to recycle machines for reasons other than politics. Aside from dumping laws, there is always someone you know that could use an older machine. Or you can donate it to the VOA or Goodwill for a tax credit.

-Jem

Re:Check your local laws

That always amased me about the US: How manufacturers and sellers don't have to take responsibility for the stuff they sell.

Making people pay to get rid of the hazardous waste is the wrong aproach, because guess what, lots of people will opt for the free aproach of dumping the stuff somewhere.

Much better is the model used for example in Scandinavia. If you sell a certain type of electric thingie, you have to be willing to take it back, at no cost, and dispose of it properly.

This means, if you've got an old computer you want to get rid of, you can deliver it, without paying, to any shop that sells computers. No it doesn't matter if they didn't sell *this*spesific* computer.

The practical offshot is offcourse that the sellers bake the cost of this into the cost of a new computer, I've seen calculations that say these rules makes new computers $5-$10 more expensive than they'd otherwise be. I think that's a acceptable trade-off.

Let's turn this around for a minute

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.

Re:Let's turn this around for a minute

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:Can anyone provide more explanation?

Well, I think it's really important to realize that 1kg = 2.2lbs, not the other way arround. Thus: 240kg of fossil fuels is 529lbs; 22kg of chemicals is 48lbs; while 1,500kg of water is 3,300lbs of water, it's still ~395 gallons.

It is a dilema

For me, it is a dilema. Between an upgrade, you get a more efficient hardware at similar price-energy ratio, thus more energy "friendly".

But with these, you get headache junking old hardware, and suffocate our habitat.

Consider this option, Computers for Africa [computers4africa.org]

A similar report on BBC, Computers 'must become greener [bbc.co.uk]

Its not really 1.8 Metric Tonnes

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

A PC uses more than ten times its weight in fossil

The BBC [bbc.co.uk] is running a report [bbc.co.uk] from one of the UKs regional recycling centers [rei.org.uk]

"It says a PC uses more than ten times its weight in fossil fuels and chemicals to manufacture."

"One of the ways of extending the life of a computer is to make it more easy to upgrade, rather than the current trend constantly replacing them for a better model as soon new versions become available."

Preaching to the choir...

PC, and a very strong argument for trying to leverage older equipment

This is /. , some people here still keep their houses warm with the idle drone of their VAX clusters ;)

Seriously, I still have my 386sx kicking around. All it has is DOS 5.0 and old games, but hey, I'm using it.

I guess computers are evil then?

Isn't it time we start thinking for ourselves when dealing with environmental claims?

Sometimes environmental claims are exaggerated or simply untrue. Consider that while you're still allowed to own a computer.

Environmentally friendly manufacturers

I've not bought a PC from them yet, but I like the look of Hoojum [hoojum.com]. They certainly seem to be the most ethical manufacturer I've come across. Does anyone else know of any companies that do similar things?

You should ask...

how much raw materials is needed to produce "ecological" stuff (both mechanical and food).

Hmmm...

Does anyone else have the sneaking suspicion that they're including the entire chain of manufacture and resources used in those numbers? Like, the water used to mine the ores to make the steel, which is made with x ammount of electricity, which is in turn produced by x ammount of fossil fuels, to be bent into the case frame, etc.?

I'm all for reduce, reuse, recycle... but I'd rather that other proponents of it don't mislead in order to promote the three R's. (Not to make accusations, of course....)

I'd also like to see their numbers on LCD screens.

~UP

Blame support and maintenance policies

I've done a study into this, and the no.1 reason that a large company upgrades its hardware and software is that the manufacturer has declared it obsolete and will no longer support it. In many instances the old systems were barely breaking sweat when they were stripped out and replaced with something 10x faster.

Admittedly, PC hardware isn't directly affected by the withdrawal of support, because the open standard means you can swap failed bits out. However, when MS stop supporting NT or Office 97 you're shafted, because you can't run the replacement on that hardware without spending almost as much as a new box would cost. So they get you in the end.

I'm sick of the leveraging old equipment argument.

Can't remember the brand of cigarette, but their ads always featured some long legged model with the tagline "We've come a long way baby"

Using SSH and console is ok, when I just have to pop in really quick to edit some conf file, or tail -f some log. %80 of the time i'm doing this, it's pertaining to some clients web site i'm working on.

Guess what though? Do I fire up lynx to view my changes? Hell no! I use mozilla or IE, or some other html renderer. Do I create graphics or video from the console too? Hell no, I use some graphic program, with some nice gui, and pretty little icons everywhere BECAUSE I LIKE IT!!!!

Not only do I like it for that kind of work, I like it FAST! The faster the better!

Does it look like I care about leveraging old hardware for modern content? (shameless plug)

What I do use old equipment for is an ipcop [ipcop.org] firewall. I also use it to frankenstien together stepper motor interfaces [aaroncake.net] because it IS old and I don't give a crap if it catches on fire because I wired something the wrong way.

Here's the whole wrapup to my post, i.e. the point. I read slashdot everyday, I build mosix clusters using plumpOS (couldn't remember the link sorry) My garage is filled from top to bottom with old computer crap because I know i'm not average joe sixpack user, and I will find a purpose for it even if it's just for research or fun. Average joe sixpack doesn't care about these things, he just wants his little clickety click icons to open up faster, or his OS to load quicker, or his games to run better.

And I sympathize with him %100. Thanks Joe sixpack for not taking the time to learn what I do, because I'm that car that stops outside your house to load up that PC you put out with your trash.

Upgrade less often???

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.

Misleading

That first paragraph is a little misleading. The author makes it sound like the material cost to produce a PC is the same as it is to build a car. He's actually comparing the raw materials needed for a PC to the final weight of a car. Confused me for a while.

At least monitors are a somewhat stable investment

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.

And what about running costs...

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...

Upgrading can be worse

Consider this: when I need more PC power, I could replace part of the machine (say: motherboard, cpu, memory, disk drive) or I could buy a new system.

When replacing only part, I could say that I saved the environment by not replacing everything. But at the same time, I have discarded part of a system, useless to everyone but a few hobbyists.

When I would have bought a new system, I would have left one complete machine that could be useful to someone else. I could sell it, donate it to a school project, or whatever. It could probably run a few more years before it is useless to anyone.

So, instead of discarding useless parts into the environment, I actually only damaged the economy (because the one who gets my old machine does not need to buy a new one). That does not seem to be such a big deal.

Valorlux: ditch your old PC to access our flashy

web site

Here in Luxembourg, we have non-profit organization to handle recycling (pick-up of recyclable items, such as glass, cardboard, certains kinds of plastic bottles and milk cartons). Their name is Valorlux [valorlux.lu]. A couple of weeks ago, I needed to look up the date of their next pick-up, and was stumped by their flash-only website.

I sent them a mail about it, and got the following reply:

Subject: L'internet n'est pas...

Cher Monsieur Xxxxx,

La page 'macromedia' qui apparait est en fait une passerelle qui vous permet
de telecharger un logiciel
du nom de 'Flash 6' ce dernier etant absolument necessaire pour naviguer
dans le site VALORLUX sans probleme.
VALORLUX a choisi d'offrit ce logiciel et son telechargement entierement
gratuitement afin de permettre a toutes les personnes n'ayant pas ce systeme
de pouvoir visiter notre site.
Ce ne sont absolument pas des publicites pour des societes americaines - ni
autres - simplement des outils
facilitant l'acces au site.
Si vous n'avez pas reussi a le telecharger c'est probablement que votre
ordinateur n'est soit pas assez
puissant, soit un peu trop 'age' pour utiliser ces produits, nous en sommes
absolument desoles.

Nous vous prions de croire en nos salutations les meilleures.

VALORLUX Asbl
Muriel Fedele
Responsable de la Communication
BP 26
L-3205 LEUDELANGE

The last sentence, in English: If you have not succeeded in downloading it [the Flash plugin], it is likely that your computer is either not powerful enough, or a little bit too "old" for using these products, and we are absolutely sorry about this.

Yes, and in order to resolve this issue, I'm supposed to buy a new one, throw the old one into the trash, and waste precious 1.8 tons of raw materials. Way to go, Valorlux!

Reusability of water #.

From here http://symptom.mit.edu/mt/tso2.htm

" Another cause for concern is the large quantity of water used. Manufacturing a computer involves using large amounts of water to rinse off the components. Estimates say that repeatedly rinsing printed circuit boards requires 33,000 liters of water per computer and more than 12,000 liters for semiconductors (Computers and Society, p7). This water cannot be recycled because of the chemical contamination from solvent residue, and thus must be stored. However, as with any chemical storage, as mentioned above, there exists some risk of leakage. When leakage occurs, the polluted water can go into the soil and cause the drinking water in the area to become poisoned."

So before you all keep ranting on about the reusability of water and you dont have to catr because you are American and SOOOO much better than the half of the world who need that water to keep their children alive, just check your facts.

Numbers by themselves are meaningless

I don't want to pay these people $35 to buy a copy of their report, nor do I have time to read the whole thing. But I suspect that anyone who does take the time will find faults with the stated conclusions. They aren't necessarily lying -- it's just that the nature of the topic is complex and therefore subject to multiple interpretations.

Due to the interconnected nature of the economy, I don't think that it is meaningful to just say that it takes a certain amount of raw materials to manufacture a computer. For example, does the figure include the water that the cow drank that went into the hamburger that the trucker ate while delivering the VGA connectors? It also takes a ridiculous amount of water [ran.org] to produce a little bit of beef, you know. Perhaps that was a bit far-fetched, but you can see how there could be lots of discretion in deciding what to include or exclude in the tally.

One way to see if their methodology is fair is to compare the environmental impact of producing computers with that of other products. Here I sense that between the UN University and InfoWorld, someone is being sloppy / misleading / sensationalistic.

• The organization's website [it-environment.org] says that the amount of fossil fuel used to produce an automobile is roughly equal to the product's weight -- which I estimate at 1000 kg.
• Their website then suggests that PC manufacturing is wasteful because manufacturing a PC uses 240 kg of fossil fuels, which is 10 times the weight of the finished product.
• The InfoWorld article says that producing a computer uses about the same amount of raw materials as producing a mid-size car.
• But another way you could interpret this is that PC manufacturing uses mostly water, while car manufacturing is harmful because it relies more heavily on fossil fuels.

I think that may be a bit unfair to compare the materials used to produce a PC and a car against their respective final weights. The goal of electronics is to fit as much complexity as possible into ever shrinking products. The goal of car manufacturers is to make their cars as roomy and as lightweight as practical. Why don't they celebrate the fact that a solar-powered calculator can compute what it used to take an ENIAC to compute? In that light, we're already making tremendous environmental progress.

What does it mean to say that water is used? If you take the water and mix it with some nasty chemicals, then it's polluted. If you use it to wash some dirt off of something, it's dirty but easily returnable to the environment. If you use it to carry away heat in a sealed heat exchanger, it remains perfectly clean but might make some fish unhappy when you return it to the river at a slightly higher temperature. If you took it from the Seattle, it's no big deal; if you took it from Ethiopia, it's a crime against humanity. How much of the 1500 kg of water in a PC is "used" in each way?

Anyway, I don't doubt that PC manufacturing has some significant environmental impact, and that we should find ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle. But I'm sure that anyone who wants to write a report with an opposite viewpoint could easily do so. Just be aware that the authors have an interest in picking the comparisons that generate the maximum shock value.

using water?

...requires at least 240 kilograms of fossil fuels, 22 kilograms of chemicals and 1,500 kilograms of water.

So, 1500Kg's is water... How do you use water such that it doesn't go back into circulation?
I mean, are they keeping the water in the computers or blasting it off into space after using it?

Resonably, the water is put back where it came from after being used and cleaned, so really it requires 300Kg's of raw material to produce a PC.

monitor requires at least 240 kilograms of fossil fuels

Monitors run on petrol?
I'd like to know how they got these figures. I mean, they didn't do something retarded like checking how much energy is used to produce a monitor, checking how much petrol would be required to produce that energy and then just using that figure?

Depending on where you are, the energy could be coming from water/wind/sun, or some other enviromentally friendly source.

I don't doubt for a second that PC's are unfriendly to the enviroment, and we should try to recycle... but 1800Kgs, when 1500 of it is water.. c'mon...

The sad thing

The sad thing is that you won't save all of these resources by not purchasing that computer. Sure, the first order effect will be that one less computer is manufactured. However, the second order effects in a market economy will be:

1. Less demand for the resources in question
2. A drop in the price of the resources in question
3. As a result of cheaper resources: More demand for the resources for other uses

There will also be second order effects in terms of your own behavior, depending on what you get instead of the monitor. If you get a digital camera instead, the environment may be no better off (or even worse). If you, on the other hand, spend it for a massage, a restaurant dinner or a nice painting, then the environment will still remain grateful.

In the end, global resource consumption will reflect the aggregated preferences of us consumers in terms of resource-hungry vs. resource economical products and services.

It's hard not to upgrade

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.

one gallon of gasoline

It takes [eurekalert.org] 98 tons of plant material (annual output from 40 acres) to make one gallong of gasoline.

Other facts from the same research:

• Dukes also calculated that the amount of fossil fuel burned in a single year - 1997 was used in the study - totals 97 million billion pounds of carbon, which is equivalent to more than 400 times "all the plant matter that grows in the world in a year," including vast amounts of microscopic plant life in the oceans.
  
  
• "Every day, people are using the fossil fuel equivalent of all the plant matter that grows on land and in the oceans over the course of a whole year," he adds.
  
  
• In another calculation, Dukes determined that "the amount of plants that went into the fossil fuels we burned since the Industrial Revolution began [in 1751] is equal to all the plants grown on Earth over 13,300 years."
  

Oh, that's nothing!

I bet it takes WAY more material to make a stupid user. Why not cut the fat there instead of going after the little guy? :)

upgrade == replace

I recently had a motherboard die in my 2 year old computer - a 1GHZ P3. So, off I go to the computer store trying to buy a new mobo. Sorry, they don't make them anymore.

Ok, so I try to find out what it would take to buy a cheap replacement that they do have. This is great except for the replacement mobo requires a new CPU since the old one won't work in it. It also uses DDR ram instead of SDRAM. And, it consumes more power, so the old power supply won't work. Oh, and the new power supplies don't fit into the old case, so I need a new case, too.

Of course, I was able to reuse the old drives (hard, floppy, cd) and the old monitor, keyboard & mouse. So it's definately friendlier than buying a whole new PC w/monitor combo. It's cheaper too. Still, IMHO, upgrading is a lot more replacement than upgrade.

$.02

Computers are not "static" consumer appliances

Unlike your refrigerator, radio, television, or microwave, you can't just buy a computer today and expect it to run the latest software 2-4 years from now.

While your refrigerator, radio, television, or microwave can handle the latest in food and radio-broadcast entertainment, software has an ever-changing specification. The computer must conform to the software.

You can upgrade a computer to some extent, but eventually, the system bus speeds reach their peak (if the hardware itself hasn't died).

I'm all for upgrading a PC or "recycling" an old one to people who have less sophisticated needs for a computer.

Even a 486 or a Pre-G3 Power Macintosh can surf the web and do email.

But I'm a gamer and an enthusiast. I upgrade/rebuild my rig constantly, and as far as I know, only my basement suffers from the aggregation of old parts... at least the ones I can't use to build mini Linux PCs.

Computers have more of a positive impact.

This is such a non-story. What is the point of the study?

The computer manufacturing business is one of the most cut throat businesses on the planet. Every tiny bit of slack in the process must be eliminated in order to stay competitive. This means that they must use as few raw materials as possible. Energy consumption is minimized. The part count is kept to a minimum. There is as little waste as possible.

Let's talk about some of the positive impacts of computer use. I use mine with VPN to handle work for customers without traveling. This results in fewer plane rides, rental cars, and sitting in traffic. In my professional work I use computers to monitor environmental impact at manufacturing and industrial plants. I also use them to help make the processes more efficient which lessens the environmental impact of the activities.

Computers are also used to mange traffic in large cities. They are used to manage public transportation facilities. I've done work for logistics companies that manage the shipment of goods to reduce fuel consumption, lessening the environmental impact of these activities.

Let's face it. Computers are the most valuable modern tool that we have developed. The impact of manufacturing one is more than offset by all of the positive impacts of their use.

Worrying about the environmental impact of producing this valuable tool when we already know how competitive it is to manufacture them and how efficiently it is already done seems really silly.

Perhaps we should do a study of the impact of all of the CO2 that is emitted during worthless UN debates. Certainly it is impacting global warming in an adverse fashion.

Hey UN, stop worrying about inane crap like this. Last I heard there was some shit going down in Haiti that you might want to concentrate on. While you're at it, Kim Jong Il is starving his people. I'm sure there are a lot of other areas of much higher impact that you could concentrate on. You do some really good work out there. This type of study isn't helping though.

You must take interesting showers

"1.5 tons of water is about the same amount of water that you use taking a shower or a bath."

Actually, er, no. My shower head is a 2.5 gpm water saver, but let's consider an old fashioned 6 gpm water waster mega fountain. Now, I like long showers, but more than 10 minutes? I don't think so. So 6 gpm times 10 minutes is 60 gallons, or 229 kg - a far cry from 1500 kg!

Now, since I am using only 2.5 gpm and it has an instant on-off button on it, I only need maybe 50 kg even for a 10 minute shower.

BTW, the water saver shower heads provide a very satisfying output.

PC industry needs to change

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.

Re:PC industry needs to change

3. PCs are far too general purpose. They're designed to do everything, but nothing really well.

General purpose PC's allow people to have one computer to do computer things. This allows developers to create new ideas - for existing hardware! It's a really neat trick, and pretty much the only reason that software development has taken off like it has. It's kinda like the concept of making general purpose things like, say, screws, gears, wheels, etc. Ya know, that industrial revolution thing. You got a circuit specifically built for posting on SlashDot?

2. Games drive things far too much. Why does every PC made since 1997 include AGP hardware?

Technology moves forward when people push the envelope and want more. Games use a wide range of diverse technologies, and are constantly at the edge because that's what seems to entertain the purchasers of the games the most. It's the "Ooooh! Aaaaah!" factor - keeping it means outdoing the last each time. That drive to do more and outdo what's been done is what makes science and technology change. It's the reason we're not still sharpening sticks. I'm kinda glad we've got that drive.

AGP being on every motherboard probably has something to do with AGP becoming what's called a standard. Standards are kinda cool - they let multiple companies make things that work together. You seem to be arguing that there should be no internet - but rather only a copper wire stretched between any two points of communication, where the protocol is unique to each. Otherwise, ya know, it's general purpose and not all the bandwidth is always used.

1. CPU power consumption keeps increasing at a dramatic rate, even though the vast majority of PCs are underutilized by ~80%.

Where are you getting that 80% statistic? Do you mean "When a person isn't running anything, the processor isn't getting used"? Duh. If I never used but 20% of my processor, why do some operations take measureable time? Maybe because I'm *using* the full processor... hmmm... that means - if I have a faster processor, I wait less time for results.

I remember when generating an RSA key took several minutes, and compiling a moderately large piece of software could take a day or two. I'm pretty happy to have technology that makes both doable within the time it takes to grab a cup of coffee. Sure, I'd love for them to be instantaneous, but that'd take using something like 1000% of my 2.1GHz processor. It's almost doable with distributed or grid computing with enough back end resources, but then running most of that grid software requires a general purpose PC, 'cause it's kinda new technology...

4. Processor speed, memory requirements, they've all gotten very soft and meaningless.

I'll agree with that to some degree - but it's because there are so many factors that contribute to what a 'requirement' is and there's a finite time to test before shipping a product. Say you have a program with an embedded web browser.... How much RAM does it need? Well, maybe 10MB... Wait - what if the browser goes to a page with a 5MB bitmap on it? And at the same time, a Java VM starts up? What if the user can open multiple windows - as many as she wants until memory runs out? Most companies set requirements based on the minimum levels that feel 'responsive' under slightly averse conditions across a finite set of hardware. It isn't going to be a hard number, because different people use software different ways, and there are a *lot* of hardware configurations out there.

Similarly, people blindly advocate 1GB over 512MB without any real reason.

1GB = 512MB * 2. Twice as much means you can run twice as many programs or use software that requires twice as much memory. I've used quite a bit more than 1GB of RAM before, and it's a lot faster reading from RAM than swapping to disk and back, test it out someti

Put it in perspective

Crafting a nice pile of feces takes several more liters of water, both in the production of the feces (many digestive processes are hydro-based) and its removal down the sewers.

Are you gonna stop pooping?

The thing about water

The thing about "using" water is that... well, after you use it, it's still water. You can dump chemicals into, you can shit in it, it's still water. So it's hard to say that it's "consumed." Really it's just dirtied, and can be cleaned and turned back into clean water somehwat more easily than, say, replacing oil that was burned.

Economies of scale

Don't you just love pricing? Imagine what you or I would pay to acquire:

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.

Somewhat misleading

The article cites the total mass of raw material to make the computer as being 1.8 tons--1800 kg. Let's break that down.

1500 kg of that is water. It's not used up--it's supposed to be treated and then sent down the drain. It gets recycled fairly quickly. My monitor doesn't contain a ton and a half of water--does yours? So where did that water go? We each use about 200 kg of water per day just in our homes--washing laundry, flushing toilets, showering. 1500 kg seems like a lot, but we each use that much every week.

240 kg of fossil fuels. Well, that's a possibility. How is that assessed? That's (ballpark) a hundred gallons of gasoline. That's what someone living 25 miles from work might use in two months of commuting. It's not enough fuel to get your motorhome to the Grand Canyon and back for your vacation this summer. The figure also assumes that all the energy used to produce the computer comes from fossil fuels. If nuclear energy was used, that 240 kg of fuel corresponds to roughly 2 cubic centimetres (half a teaspoon) of unenriched uranium. If hydroelectricity was used, the cost would be kinetic energy from many tons of moving water. (See note above regarding the recycling of water.)

22 kg of 'chemicals'. Well, that's certainly vague. Water is a chemical. Some of those chemicals are acutely nasty. Some are moderately unpleasant. Some will be relatively harmless. Does that 22 kg include the finished product? I mean, the computer itself with CRT is probably up around ten or fifteen kilograms...

Other posters have already noted that a useful report would compare these totals to the resources used in the production of other products: home appliances, automobiles, cotton. (The Aral Sea is drying up largely because of cotton growing in the area. It takes about 5000 kg of water to grow one kilogram of cotton. The environmental costs of the pesticides and bleaches used in cotton production I will leave for another post.)

Wheels of industry

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.

This statement is based on BS

"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?

RMI's work with STMicroelectronics

If you are interested in the ecological footprint of computers, reading "Ecology is Free - RMI's work with STMicroelectronics" [rmi.org] should be required reading.

Some of the highlights:

• Microchip fabrication facilities (or "fabs") are complex and energy-intensive.
  
• Energy accounts for less than 2 percent of a chip's cost, yet electricity can be the largest single operating expense for a chipmaker, totaling millions of dollars annually at a single fab.
  
• Despite great innovation, semiconductor manufacturing fosters a risk-averse corporate culture due to exacting process requirements, safety risks, the high cost of downtime, and brutal competition in a fast-moving marketplace.
  

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]

how much to manufacture a 1kw Solar Panel?

how much fuel and water does it take to manufacture 1kw worth of solar electric panels?

BS

1500 lbs of water can be reclaimed this is just more eco BS. The manufactures could probably do better but this is alarmist.

Re:tons

1 ton = 2240 lb (or 20 cwt or 160 stones, if you're British) . By a happy accident, 1 metric tonne = 2204lb. They are so very nearly equivalent that you can ignore the difference for shock-horror enviro scare stories ;-)

Re:Environmentalism = Hatred of mankind

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