Story of Stuff - A Green View of Stuff
Monday, December 10, 2007 at 2:13AM Charles Earnest a Seattle Green Festival Catalyst sent an interesting link to The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard that tells
From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.
And, she discusses the PC obsolesnce.
There would be an interesting story for Servers in a data center in that a typical life cycle is 3 years before server hardware is osbsoleted out of a data center and possibly accelerating to even shorter times given the fast pace of energy efficiency improvements. Jim Lynch in a technet article discusses how PCs are recycled.
One of the most amazing aspects of the Community MAR program is that it is able to supply licenses for Windows® 2000 and Windows XP for only $5 USD. MARs supply these licenses—over 200,000 a year—on refurbished PCs to nonprofit organizations, schools, libraries, colleges, and, in the U.S., technology-access programs for low-income or disabled individuals. In this way, Community MARs reach those on the wrong side of the digital divide, providing access to educational and employment opportunities.
Shouldn't the same be available for Servers? One statistic I've heard is that 30% of servers are sold to Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Think of how many communities could benefit from the servers powering search. The problem is it is easy for a corporate culture to recycle servers. It is far to easy to scrap the IT hardware to insure protection of intellectual property. All it takes is one law suit to scare the attorney's to make it a corporate policy that all IT hardware will be destroyed.
Google has a good excuse in scrapping/destroying their server hardware in that who can run anything on their non-standard hw. What is the environmental impact of Googles' server hw ewaste vs. its latest renewable energy initiative?
Reader Comments (1)
In this world we have become as humans consumers. We consume every thing.
The problem arises when we forget that what we consume, then throw away, not all of our waste gets properly disposed of.
Not seen, not thought of right?
When our electrical items fail we just throw them away not thinking of where they go.
Here is how you can insure that when you discard your items, your items do not land up in a land fill, or over seas just to pollute a more poverty stricken area:
Make sure that your recycler only uses a complete Eco friendly down stream for the materials being recycled.
This means that when you discard a TV or old computer it only goes to processes that will be completely Eco and human friendly.
Recycling should not be at the cost of our environment or the cost of human rights and safety.
We as a company could make hundreds more on these materials we collect for free, if we just turn our heads and say, not seen not thought of.
We feel that if we can prove that recycling can be done in the cleanest safest way possible so that our environment, and the people who live in it, are not injured in the process, we might just show that recycling can be a culture not a cost.
If we as recyclers do not take this philosophy, then we our selves will pose an environmental risk instead of a solution.
Some times a little less profit can still benefit everyone in the process.
Recycle please, but do it completely Eco friendly.
Besides that.............profit will not matter after a while.......we will end up polluting our selves out of a planet in the long run if we do not start practicing this soon.
Thank youMike DolbowCEO / Green Planet Solutions Inc.www.atotalgps.com