[Wolves] Environmental impact of websites

[sparkes]

On Tue, 2004-01-20 at 18:02, trog wrote:

> At work (a school) all the kids are printing off previous exam papers that 
> they have located on the web.  They print off huge wads of paper, none of 
> which gets read.  Also they do all their course work on PCs, printing off 
> huge wads of stuff all downloaded.   When I was at school and we had a 
> thousand word essay to write, we'd labour for days doing it.  Now you can 
> knock it up in a couple of minutes. 

I saw the same thing at the college.  The amounts of paper wasted by
young people (I can say this now I'm 31) is amazing.  I couldn't have
imagined printing 50 pages of on the school dot matrix or college laser
printers when I was that age but these days you find ten people trying
to print of a 50 page paper to have a print out of two paragraphs.  Did
doesn't occur to them to just print out the relevent section and share
it they have to have one each of the whole document. 

The one thing that really got me going is the fact students will print
off a copy then spell check it then print it out again they try another
font and print it out again then again and again and again.  They
couldn't understand that paper is not as cheap as they percive it.  It
might cost less than a penny a sheet but that soon adds up and every 1p
of paper probably costs most of that in transport and other wasted
resources.  Every meeting I asked when we would get recycling bins in
the computer rooms and this just made it worse.  Students now see paper
as  nothing.  Now the whole class will print out every font change and
then immediatly bin it.  No thought whatsoever of how much this waste
costs them.

In answer to Matts original post There are formulas for working out the
environmental costs based on input and outputs but i can't find them ;-)
exercise for the reader time.  the centre for alternative technology has
some good links and that might be where I saw it originally.

sparkes