I’m fascinated by the way tech products are born, live and die. Innovative devices start as high-priced luxuries and slowly become necessities. Then — often when they seem at the peak of their popularity — they suddenly feel old and obsolete, replaced by something better. Think of the typewriter, land-line telephone or video-cassette recorder. (JVC GR-AX40 battery)The digital camera and GPS device could soon be on the way out, replaced by a tiny cellphone. And it’s starting to look like the personal computer may be headed to the same technology landfill. As smartphones get more versatile and powerful and tablets become increasingly popular, the PC seems less like a necessity and more like a dinosaur.(JVC GR-D50 charger)
As technology flashes in and out of our lives, it’s worth asking about the relative environmental impacts of the new and the old. While tablets and smartphones are smaller and more exciting, are they greener than the computers they’re replacing?(JVC GR-D50 charger)
In a word, yes. Consider the products Apple offers. (I’m not shilling for Apple. It’s just that they make phones, computers and tablets, so it’s easier to do an apples-to-apples comparison, so to speak. Apple also gets environmental cred for announcing plans for a corporate headquarters that will run mainly off the grid, generating its own electricity.) Both the iPhone 4 and the iPad run between three and six watts of power during use, with significant variation depending on what you’re using the device for. An entry-level MacBook Pro, a laptop, uses more energy than that even when idle. When in heavy use, the laptop uses around 18 watts of energy.(SAMSUNG VP-D371W charger)
Compared with desktops, laptops use energy pretty efficiently, because engineers have to worry about OLYMPUS LI-10B battery life. To prolong the per-charge running time, they incorporate more power-management features. By contrast, a desktop is plugged into the wall, providing it with an unlimited supply of coal-powered electricity to feed its energy requirements. During start-up, a 27-inch desktop iMac consumes as much as 140 watts as it runs a series of processes to wake its operating system, dipping down to between 70 and 90 watts during ordinary use.(PANASONIC NV-GS120 battery)
Put all those numbers into perspective. Let’s say you work out of a home office, and you spend 40 hours per week for a year doing your computing. Your desktop computer would be responsible for emitting approximately 217 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. (On average, U.S. power plants emit 1.306 pounds of carbon dioxide for every kilowatt-hour of energy they produce.) If, instead, you went with the tablet, your annual carbon footprint would drop to just 11 pounds — a 95 percent savings.(FUJIFILM NP-40 battery)
In absolute terms, 206 pounds of carbon dioxide isn’t all that much. The average passenger car emits that much over just 225 miles of travel, and your refrigerator is probably responsible for emitting that weight of carbon dioxide every month. On the aggregate, however, power consumption would drop tremendously if everyone used a tablet instead of a desktop. Sixty-eight percent of the approximately 140 million American workers use a computer on the job, which makes for a potential savings of nearly a million tons of carbon dioxide if they used tablets rather than desktops. That’s more than the total annual carbon footprint of 54 countries.
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