How IT cos hurt environment

How IT cos hurt environment

The machines that handle the world's computing tasks are also some of the planet's biggest polluters. Data centers, PCs, mobile phones and gaming consoles use electricity that frequently comes from coal-burning power plants or other sources of energy that give off high carbon emissions. 

The information and communication technology (ICT) industry in the US is on track to quadruple its consumption of electricity between 2009 and 2020, according to a study released today from the Institute for Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics (ISAID) in Singapore and Rice University in Houston, Texas. 

Unless electronics can be altered to become significantly more energy-efficient, the related carbon emissions from these products are set to grow as well, says the report. In the US carbon emissions related to tech products will grow from 72.95 megatons of carbon dioxide released in 2009 to 195.06 megatons released in 2020. 

About 6 per cent of the world's electricity consumption goes to power cellphones, computers, data centers and other information and communication technology, according to a March 2010 report from market research firm SBI Energy. That electricity accounts for about 2 percent of the world's global carbon emissions. 

"The issue of power will be prevalent everywhere," says Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM. 

IBM is among companies already trying to reduce energy consumption. Supercomputers, for example, are some of the biggest energy consumers in tech and research facilities can spend millions per year in energy bills to run these machines. When the Green500 List was released in July, IBM had 17 of the top 20 most energy-efficient supercomputers. IBM supercomputers averaged 201 million calculations per second per watt while other supercomputers averaged 102 million calculations per second per watt, according to Green500.org. 

Ambitious as the efforts of IBM and other companies may be, they may not be enough to keep the IT industry from making an outsized contribution to carbon emissions. If the U.S. continues on this same path, global carbon emissions related to PCs and laptops, which accounted for 48.5 percent of all global ICT emissions in 2009 will nearly quadruple by 2020. Data center emissions will more than triple by 2020, according to today's report. 

Do you have any ideas for making tech products more sustainable? I'd love to hear them.

source :http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/enterprise-it/services-apps/How-IT-cos-hurt-environment/articleshow/7292189.cms