Setting the scene…
Sun - the computer company - sent me some interesting stats today.
Get this…
Green Computing Stats
- According to Adam Braunstein, senior research analyst, Robert Frances Group, a city of 40,000 people could be powered with the amount of electricity needed to run a single, large data center, and up to 40 percent of the operating cost of the building that houses the data center could be power- and cooling-related expenses. (From “The Greening of the CIO” CIO Insights, July 2006)- Big companies spend 15% to 20% of their data center’s operating budget on power and cooling, says IDC analyst John Humphreys. For heavy tech users, that can run into millions of dollars a year.
- By 2009, technology operations in the U.S. will spend twice as much for power and cooling as they did to buy the server hardware in their data centers, according to IDC.
- Data center power usage will be the No. 1 infrastructure concern facing IT executives over the next 3 years, according to Robert Frances Group (as stated in Network World, 8/3/06).
- Total energy used by PCs in the UK in a year is 3.7 GW/h, or about 1% of total power usage. Generating this much power releases 1.6m tonnes of CO2 over a year, which would require 1.6m hectares of trees to balance – which is 10% more than the whole tree stock of the UK…
- The UK produces over 1 million tonnes of electrical and electronic waste every year – or about enough to completely fill the new Wembley stadium.
- Electronic and electrical equipment makes up on average 4% of European municipal waste, and is growing three times faster than any other municipal waste stream.
- About 23,000 tonnes of e-waste was illegally shipped to non-OECD countries in the Far East, the Indian sub-continent, West Africa and China last year.
- Last year we threw away 15m mobile phones, only 15% of which were recycled. The Cadmium in each phone has the potential to pollute 600,000 litres of water, so last year’s 12.75m could pollute 32 x the volume of Lake Windermere.
- Two million working Pentium PCs will end up in landfill sites in the UK this year.
