[Wolves] Environmental impact of websites

[sparkes]

On Wed, 2004-01-21 at 10:04, Chris Procter wrote:

> 
> 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).
Disposal costs for electronic equipment is very high and exceeds the
value of the goods inside 5 years.  See our buddies at a2rt.org
lowtech.org for details ;-)

> 
> 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.
> 
When you have an online libary of resources (such as the one at
archive.org) then the shear amount of resources available and the
relitive quality of those resources when compared to the rest of the
internet (google going down the pan as it is) should more than balance
out the effect of the resources required to maintain it.  

Although working out how to measure this price point would be that phd
again ;-)  If the content is quality (Matts speciality) then the price
point is very low.  Printing and mailing catalogs once a month is far
more expensive in natural resources than showing them online.  But this
is only true if the online version is tailored to the medium and is not
just repurposed offline content that almost demands printing.  

www.makro.co.uk is an example of this.  It would be perfectly within the
bounds of such a large organisation to take data from the backoffice
systems and intergrate it into the website.  Instead they take the same
glossies that end up in the bin each month (wrong kind of paper for
doing the rabbit hutch -> compost heap -> vegtable garden route that
much of my paper does).  I don't collect enough glossy paper to consider
recycling until wolves council does something about collections becuase
the energy used to get the stuff to the closed recycle point outweighs
the resources saved :-(

> 
> chris
sparkes