

Ask HN: Does the Usefulness of Computers Outweigh the Environmental Impact? - msutherl

Hundreds of millions of computer products are trashed every year and less than 20% recycled. Many of those recycled are sent to China where they are processed by hand and the stench of melting solder blankets the city. Many processors contain gold that is largely mined by hand by under-payed workers in Africa and India. Manufacturing a single computer requires more than 1 ton of water, fossil fuel and other chemicals.<p>Much has been made of the positive ethical impact of social networking lately particularly for stimulating social justice. Moreover, writers like Stewart Brand and Bruce Sterling have argued that in order for humanity to become resilient to environmental catastrophe, we must become massively connected. In the future we will "wrangle" massive realtime data sets and global-scale sensor networks will give us a fine-grained understanding of global physical, social, biological, even one day perhaps mental phenomena. McLuhan talks of the global village. Guattari talks of a planetary consciousness.<p>Surely you are interested in computers because you believe that they can do good. Do you believe that the good that you do with computers outweighs the environmental impact (and ethical injustice) that the production of the hardware entails?
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inerte
I actually do not know how much environmental impact my desktop PC (and a 22"
monitor) made. Worse than my 42" TV? Like a car panel or maybe a dozen
cellphones?

I just don't know its costs. And I would need more details before answering
the question.

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msutherl
Good point. I was hoping that somebody might be able to provide some
information along those lines.

Googling "environmental impact of computers" turns up some data on quantity of
resources and total energy cost, but such data is seldom presented in a useful
context:

[http://www.google.ca/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=e...](http://www.google.ca/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=environmental+impact+of+computers&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=&ei=MQlrTc7tB8-gtwep1szmAg)

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us
Depends on who's behind the keyboard.

