[Wolves] Environmental impact of websites

[Chris Procter]

Am I the only person who had to pay per sheet for printouts at college/uni
at 5p a sheet you find that 50 page document costs you £2.50 (aka a pint of
beer) and realise you can live without it.

While there are lots of enviomental costs in producing and using a PC they
are a one time cost (except power and paper obviously) that then allows you
to view many many books worth of webpages, so while one computer is far less
enviromentaly friendly then one book they are not equivalent, its more like
one computer vs one (or many) library (ies).

There must be a point where a computer becomes more environmentally friendly
then books per bit of information, I guess the question is does that point
come at a realistic level.


chris


-----Original Message-----
From: Helen Randle [mailto:helenr at gmx.co.uk]
Sent: 20 January 2004 20:47
To: wolves at mailman.lug.org.uk
Subject: Re: [Wolves] Environmental impact of websites


sparkes wrote:
>
> 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.

As a student myself (a *mature* one though!!) I hate it when I see other 
students printing out half a tree of paper that you know they'll never use.
I 
do use the internet for resarch, it'd be silly not to, but I don't print out

everything I find which might be vaguely relevant. I cut and paste, change a

few words around, footnote it and there's my essay! (or maybe not!!) If you 
print, you've only got to type it all in again!!

>
> 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.

Oh yes, there was a question wasn't there. Something which might be worth 
considering is the environmental impact of the computer; how much 
power/resources are wasted in making the components

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2444675.stm

not to mention how they aren't (generally) re-used/recycled. The there's all

the excess packaging, most of which is non-biodegradable - most things come 
in plastic or polystyrene, and who hasn't bought software in a big box only 
to find a single CD inside? Then there's the manual no one ever reads ......

Well, there's some thoughts for a start!!

Helen


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