Lets face it... none of us are going to give up our computers! But it's good to know some facts and ways to lessen their (and our) impact on the environment. And we'll save money too! Yippie!
I was surprised a a lot of this stuff so decided to share.
(all these facts taken from a cute little book simply called "how to reduce your carbon footprint" -by joanna yarrow)
Some sad facts are:
-The IT industry accounts for 2% of CO2 emissions which is the same as aviation
-Over 31 million PC's are thrown away worldwide each year.
-The average PC takes around 2 tons of chemicals, fossil fuels, and water to produce, generates around 220 lb of CO2 per year, and is junked after 3 years.
-The plastic alone in each PC requires nearly 2 gallons of crude oil to make
-It's estimated that an average PC is in use for 4 hours each work day and idle for 5-6 hrs
-If you leave your computer on overnight you'll waste enough energy to laser print around 800 pages
-Only about 15% of the 250 billion -worth of power used by computers worldwide each year is spent actually computing-the rest is wasted while idling.
Some tips I just learned this morning are:
-If you need a desktop choosing one with a flat LCD (liquid crystal display) screen uses about 30% less energy than cathoderay monitors.
-Laptop computers consume up to 90% less energy than a desktop
-If you upgrade your existing computer instead of buying a new one, you could save around 500lb of fossil fuel.
-If you set your computer to enter power saving mode after 10 minutes of inactivity-this could cut its energy use by 60-70%
-Its best to shut off the computer if we aren't using it for a hour or two- it's a myth that computers use a lot of power to start up.
Namaste fellow yogi's!
