Story of Stuff - A Green View of Stuff

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? 

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The Political Pressures are Building on Green Data Centers

A friend in the UK sent this following.  And is an interesting political movement given US Assistant Secretary of Energy Presentation to the UN.

The authors of this report recently presented its findings to the UK Parliament, citing that the Impact of IT to the environment is more damaging than that of the Airline industry.  It makes for powerful reading and, whilst it does not single out specific suppliers or vendors for criticism, it’s content points to increased vocal concern over IT’s footprint.  I would be very interested in the international point of view on this.

I agree with his assessment on the report and it is interesting how they pulled this fact together to get public's attention. The pressures are going to build for anyone who has a large # of servers. Let's see what data centers get identified as bad for the environment. This is why I think Google has chosen the renewable energy area as a public relations issue.

It is estimated that a medium-sized server has roughly the

same annual carbon footprint as an SUV vehicle doing 15

miles per gallon

(29)

. The power required for a rack of highdensity

server blades can be 10-15 times greater than a

traditional server

(30)

.Carbon Neutral Company

(30)

Rakesh Kumar, Gartner Analyst, Sep 2006

(29)

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Bush Official targets Data Centers as "Centers of Enormous Waste"

Google has decided to get in the renewable energy business, but I think the public and gov't would much prefer Google share its energy efficiency methods.

A Bush administration official has identified data centers as centers of enormous waste. It is only a matter of time before the environmental groups go after data centers. 

And, I do think there is bad behavior in data centers which needs to be changed. I was talking to a person who works with a large retailer and he found that the data center server utilization was 7%.  People need to learn how to turn servers off.

UNITED NATIONS (BetaNews) - US Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency Alexander Karsner, speaking this morning before a United Nations conference on the technology industry's responsibility for the global environment, said that as the world's data centers become more clustered and crowded, they expend too much space and electricity and generate too much heat and emissions. As such, Sec. Karsner said, the typical enterprise data center has become "a center of enormous waste."

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