Running the Eco-Numbers:
a review of Computers and the Environment:
Understanding and Managing Their Impacts
eds. Eric Williams and Ruediger Kuehr
Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers; ISBN 1402016808
300 pages, Paperback 0.52 x 9.66 x 6.18 , $35.00
ZONE Reviewer: Lee Goldberg
If you are a regular reader, you'll know that my daughter Anwyn makes appearances in my columns. This time she helped me figure out why people have such a hard time understanding the importance of factoring in environmental issues whenever we design, manufacture, or use things. While it's easy to understand the connectedness of all life in the abstract, most of us have a difficult time applying this to our real lives. An incident with my daughter and her allowance helped me understand this, and then a new book from a friend helped drive the lesson home.
It all started when we were settling up Anwyn's allowance for the month. She'd hoped to buy a new CD from "Pink," her latest rock idol, but was several dollars short. In fact, she was shocked to discover that she only had a few dollars left to last her till the end of the month. We reminded her that she'd borrowed some money from us to buy a few impulse items on our last shopping trip, and that we'd deducted that from the sum we dole out to her. At seven, it's only natural that she'd had a little trouble anticipating the long-term impact of a few trinkets on her budget until we ran the numbers a few times and showed her where her money went. She made us both proud of her when she stopped pouting and began to work out a saving plan to make sure she had money for the bigger things she really wants.
This prompted me to wonder if one of the reasons we've been so slow to bring green practices to the electronics industry is that we haven't "run the numbers" ourselves. While inertia and short-sightedness may have played a role, much of our difficulty may be because we've had a hard time quantifying the real costs, benefits, and impacts of the stuff we make, and the real dividends we can reap from more sustainable alternatives.
Happily, my friend Eric Williams has written a very interesting new book that may help us begin to get a handle around many of the elusive issues that have kept us from taking a rational look at environmental issues until now. Entitled Computers and the Environment: Understanding and Managing Their Impacts (available at Amazon.com), the book takes us on a journey that explores the life cycle of a computer from multiple perspectives, and helps weave together the seemingly disconnected universes of engineers, business people and environmentalists.
Even if all the editors, Eric Williams and Ruediger Kuehr, managed to do was to come up with all kinds of fascinating factoids about the resources consumed by computers and related products, it would be a very worthwhile read. We learn, for instance, that making the average 53 lbs desktop computer & monitor requires 530 lbs of fossil fuels, 50 lbs of chemicals and 3330 lbs of water, or roughly the weight of a sports utility vehicle (SUV). We also learn that the total energy used per year of owning a computer is roughly the same as a refrigerator.
But rather than simply quantify the carnage, the book goes on to document what we know today about possible solutions -- including how decisions made by consumers and manufacturers on how PCs are used and disposed of have an enormous effect on environmental impacts. I was blown away to find that reselling or upgrading computers saves 5 to 20 times more energy over the computer's life cycle as compared to recycling.
And while it does not give us a complete roadmap to eco-utopia, the book does supply a solid first-pass survey of the business, management, and regulatory issues confronting manufacturers. This is the first place I've seen a useful compilation of all the energy consumption, materials content, and electronics regulation initiatives in place around the world. It also details many practical solutions that are working today for innovators in Asia, Europe, and the US.
It's exciting to find so much good research on so many difficult topics in one place, especially when it shows us how to "run the numbers" and identify financially attractive opportunities to start building our businesses as if their grandchildren's lives depended on them.
Questions? Comments? Suggestions for other must-have green-tech books?
Write me at: lgoldberg@green-electronics.com