Tools

You want to reduce your energy consumption, but what's the most effective way of doing it ? Here's some tools for working out what to do:

Also, do you know how much space you are taking up on the planet ? Use the Ministry for the Environment's ecological footprint calculator to find out.

Sustainable Computing

Urban Sustainability

What is Sustainable Computing ?

There are two key aspects to Sustainable Computing:

  1. Effectively using information technology to manage your business in the face of increasing costs, disappearing markets and increasingly scarce resources.

  2. Making the best use of the information technology you currently have in order to minimise the damage caused by electronic waste, or E-Waste.

Why Do We Need Sustainable Computing ?

Reurbanise believes that mankind is rapidly exhausting the planets non-renewable and slowly renewing resources we use to maintain our ever-increasing economic activity. A point will be reached in the not too distant future where the energy required to sustain this growth is no longer available. Economic activity will plateau, followed shortly afterwards by a prolonged economic recession lasting probably decades.

Features of this new business environment will include:

  • High costs and increasing scarcity of raw materials, especially those made from oil and natural gas.

  • High transport costs, especially national and international air freight and road freight to and from rural areas. High costs of international freight will effectively limit New Zealand exports of all but the most valued commodities, assuming we have managed our resource base better than other countries have managed theirs, and will probably eliminate New Zealand's manufacturing export market.

  • Probably stable employment as work transitions from the disappearing service industries to the increasingly labour-intensive primary industries.

  • An increasing migration away from the larger cities towards the smaller towns driven by the transfer of jobs from the urban-based service industries to the rural-based and increasingly labour-intensive primary industries.

In this environment, Sustainable Computing will help us to:

  • Reduce energy consumption associated with IT activities.

  • Reduce the amount of resources we use in our businesses while maintaining levels of service.

  • Reduce the waste of valuable materials resulting from largely unrecyclable electronic waste.

  • Reduce the amount of natural resources made unusable by contamination with E-waste byproducts.

How is Information Technology a Problem ?

Computers are extremely resource-intensive to build compared to the amount of material they contain. What's more, computers are very difficult to recycle safely and effectively. Much of the world's obsolete computer equipment is simply shipped to places like China and India where poor labour and environmental conditions mean that a certain amount of material can be recovered from old computers using low-tech methods. However, this comes at a considerable cost to the lives of the people doing the recycling. This report details an example of the environmental degradation caused by E-waste recycling in China and India.

What Can I do about E-Waste ?

In an ideal world, computers would be completely and safely recyclable. The reality is that they are probably the least recyclable things we have ever created. The only way to minimise the damage caused by E-waste is to minimise the creation of it.

When faced with a need for new computer equipment, ask yourself:

  • Why is new gear necessary ? Can I make do with second-hand equipment ?

  • Has what I do changed ? If you're still doing the same sort of work, why upgrade ?

  • Is my software vendor forcing me to upgrade simply to continue being supported by them ?

  • Is my operating system software forcing me to upgrade because of increased system requirements ?

  • Do I need to upgrade because my clients or business partners are upgrading ?

  • If I really do need to throw that old gear away, where is it going ? Into the landfill or to someone that may be able to reuse it ?

Reduce costs associated with IT:

  • Paperless office (alternatives ? Are they really more sustainable if they rely on a lot of technology ?)

  • Retaining hardware as long as possible, and ensuring that it is not thrown away at the end of it's lifecycle (buying equipment that has a recycling path?)

  • Use desktop terminals rather than standalone PCs on a LAN to extend the life of older equipment.

How Can I Futureproof My Information Technology ?

Reurbanise believes that the future of computing will be:

  • Labour-intensive

    Much of the focus today on cost-saving technology is to remove the human element from the system and replace it with technology. However, if part of the cost of your system is human, that cost will tend to stay in your community - license fees paid to an overseas corporation won't.

  • Localised

    Local solutions tailored to local needs will be the norm. Even in the age of the Internet, global markets rely on a highly centralised, energy-intensive development and distribution model that will be increasingly difficult to sustain in a low energy world.

  • Open

    The information age has been based on standards and protocols for storing and transporting information, long before the advent of computers. Standards are based on discussion and agreement. The era of cheap energy has given birth to cheap global transport and hence the multinational corporation and the defacto information standard, requiring no discussion or agreement outside the corporation itself. Multinational corporations have no future in a low energy world missing the transport infrastructure that currently allows them to exist.

To prepare your business for this future, you could be:

  1. Using open technologies and standards to maximise backwards compatibility and system diversity, allowing older machines to run older versions of software that still use file formats compatible with newer versions running on other machines on your network. The philosophy of planned obsolescence, used by some monopolistic hardware and software companies, can in some cases cause you to have to upgrade both your hardware and your software in order to continue to use a particular software package and to receive support for it, even though the previous hardware/software combination was capable of meeting your needs.

  2. Using thin client technology to move processing to a central server and extending the life of older PCs. The Linux Terminal Server Project (www.ltsp.org) has a number of success stories, particularly in schools and community organisations, where functional computer networks have been built for very low costs. Also, Sun Microsystems has recently been pushing it's approach to sustainable computing based around the use of low power, thin client technology.

  3. Developing web-based interfaces to enterprise systems rather than desktop interfaces. Web interfaces will run on a wide range of equipment (provided they have been built using web standards) and have lower support costs than desktop equivalents.

  4. Using Open Source technologies. Many Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) studies have been done comparing, e.g., Linux to MS Windows in terms of total cost of ownership. A complaint sometimes leveled against Linux-based solutions is that they are more labour-intensive, requiring more skilled support staff. However, if you consider that these skilled support staff are part of your local community, the TCO case swings heavily in favour of Linux-based solutions from a sustainability point of view.

  5. Using technologies developed and supported locally rather than solutions from overseas companies, preferably based on open technologies.

How Can Information Technology Help Us Be More Sustainable?

Information systems are inherently energy intensive (high embodied energy cost). Justifications for new systems usually fall into two categories:

  • Allow the business to reduce costs while maintaining levels of service (doing the same with less).

  • Allow the business to increase its activities while keeping costs the same (doing more with the same).

However, in an era where energy availability and economic activity are set to continually decrease over a long period, the only way such systems will be able to be justified is if they result in a reduction in energy used by the business greater than this embodied energy. Examples of how information technology could actually reduce the energy used by your business are:

  • Ride sharing schemes for staff to reduce energy used in commuting.

  • Maximising production for local markets as opposed to global markets, where selling to the latter is vastly more energy intensive and the former offers much greater opportunity to recycle materials (localising your operation will have other benefits).

  • Teleworking and remote collaboration tools to allow employees and colleagues to work remotely, minimising energy expended in commuting.

  • Identify opportunities to reduce energy and material consumption in your business processes, e.g., finding markets for waste materials, finding ways to reduce waste production, smart control systems for reducing energy consumption of devices not being used.

  • Using smart job allocation technology, e.g., 90-20's Visual Dispatch, to reduce travel distances (and therefore energy expended) for mobile workers.

How Can Reurbanise Help ?

Reurbanise can help you practice Sustainable Computing by:

  • Doing an audit of your companies information technology needs and uses.

  • Establish a strategy for moving towards a sustainable computing future for your business.

  • Working with local technology providers to provide you with a sustainable computing platform.