Green PCs

Posted on 28 Jan 2005 at 16:56

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DOING YOUR BIT

There are many ways in which you can be more environmentally friendly. When buying a PC, think about what you actually need rather than what you want. We all want a fire-breathing leviathan of a PC with every conceivable bell and whistle, but do you really need such a beast? If you are interested only in browsing the web and doing basic office work, you will not need a powerful PC. We did a quick search on eBay and found that if you were lucky you could buy a complete system capable of running Windows XP for between £50 and £200.

Buying second-hand does not just save you money, though: it is better for the environment too. It removes the risk that toxins inside your PC are released during the recycling process - and reduces the demand for these toxins in the first place.

Even if you were to pack your old PC off to be recycled, the process would require energy, which has to be generated in some way and so will have an inevitable impact on the environment. Eric Williams (from www.it-environment.org) claims that selling or even upgrading an old PC saves "five to 20 times" more energy than recycling.

Another environment-saving measure is to switch your computer off when you are not using it. According to Energy Star (www.energystar.gov), using a PC's power management facilities can not only save you money but, in terms of CO2 emissions, is the environmental equivalent of planting between 1,000 to 6,000 square feet of trees. If you must leave your PC running, remember to configure its power management features correctly. See the box below to find out how to do this.

If your PC is starting to show its age, think about upgrading. The environmental implications of adding more RAM or a new processor, both of which could be second-hand, are smaller than the burden that building a new PC puts on the planet.

USE YOUR PDA

To help the environment further, why not use your wireless PDA to read news updates rather than buying a daily newspaper? This suggestion comes from a recent report published by Berkeley University in California. Receiving the news wirelessly on a PDA results in the release of 32 to 140 times less CO2, several times less nitrogen and sulphur dioxide and uses 26 to 67 times less water than the production of a newspaper. The report also discusses how using teleconferencing is far better for the environment than business travel. According to Berkeley researchers, staying in the office and using wireless teleconferencing "results in one to three orders of magnitude lower CO2, nitrogen and sulphur dioxide emissions than business travel". You can read an extract from the report at www.it-environment.org/publications.html - but do not print it out and waste paper.

DISPOSING OF YOUR OLD PC

As we have said, the best favour you can do the environment is to prolong the life of your computer as much as you can. You can do this through self-discipline and fighting the urge to have the newest technology as soon as it comes out. Keeping Windows clean and free of spyware, removing old programs and defragmenting the hard disk all contribute to keeping it running more smoothly and for longer.

Inevitably, though, the time will come when you simply have to buy a new computer in order to run the latest software. There is no way a PC designed to run Windows 95 will run the next version of Windows when it launches.