If I still had a doubt regarding which operating system I wanted to use in my next laptop computer, it disappeared when I read this: Linux is not only cheaper and safer that Apple’s and Microsoft’s proprietary systems, but it’s also more ecologic!
The Australian ZDNet listed 10 items on which Linux beats its rivals in environmental matters. For example, because Linux is lighter, it doesn’t need a very powerful computer to work appropriately, which saves energy.
I know that many people are reluctant to use computers based on Linux, alleging that Linux is too complicated and that they are already used to “Ruindows” by M$. The first argument used to be true, but it isn’t anymore. Check out Ubuntu and tell me what you think. I worked for the government of the city of Sao Paulo during the implementation of the local digital inclusion project and saw people from the outskirts of the city using Linux very easily. I asked some of them if they found it much different and their answer was kind of obvious: of course not; after all, they were using a computer for the first time.
This leads us to the second issue, the habit of using this or that program. Well, you may be used to drive a car and start taking a bus for financial reasons and/or environmental awareness. You are not used to giving rides but start doing it more often. You may be used to brushing your teeth with a running faucet and then find yourself having to get used to not doing it. And so on so forth.
Changing our habits (especially the bad ones) is crucial to drive us to new levels of civilization, one where there is respect for the environment, for people and for the rules of life in society, even in this great capitalist market. Sharing, tolerating, reusing and recycling. Everything in life is a matter of choice. And our choices define our future.
There is a safe way—both for rural workers and consumers—to make plants grow more and be more productive: use silicates. Silicates are a mineral class, considered to be a micronutrient by the Ministry of Agriculture. A technology that is cleaner, sustainable and natural.
According to an article by Oscar FontĂŁo de Lima Filho, a researcher at Embrapa Agropecuária Oeste, in general, silicon works in the plant’s metabolism as a kind of stress reliever. It increases the plant’s resistance to pests and diseases. Consequently, they need less pesticide and are of a better quality.
Researchers are conducting—I hate using the gerund—more studies on this technique before its actual implementation. The complete text—read here—is available on the not-for profit website, Infobibos. It has other articles on themes related to ranching, natural resources and quality management. Here is a tip in Portuguese. Could it be an alternative to transgenic species?
Read this post at the Xis-Xis blog: New technology for sustainable agriculture
Each time we dispose of an electronic product, we create a serious environmental problem. Where does that old TV, stereo, or computer that we no longer use and which is full of chemical and toxic components go? Greenpeace has been researching this topic in depth and calling attention to the export of electronic waste from Europe, America and Japan to poor countries, particularly those in Africa and Asia. The environmental organization conducted a test: in England, they took a broken, practically useless TV to be recycled. The result? The device was ‘exported’ to Nigeria. A con, pure and simple.
Check this out below:
Find out more here.
Or in the video below:
Each time we dispose of an electronic product, we create a serious environmental problem. Where does that old TV, stereo, or computer that we no longer use and which is full of chemical and toxic components go? Greenpeace has been researching this topic in depth and calling attention to the export of electronic waste from Europe, America and Japan to poor countries, particularly those in Africa and Asia. The environmental organization conducted a test: in England, they took a broken, practically useless TV to be recycled. The result? The device was ‘exported’ to Nigeria. A con, pure and simple.
Check this out below:
Find out more here.
Or in the video below:
Article by Daniela Arrais, from the Folha de SĂŁo Paulo newspaper, on rational consumption and electronics recycling:
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/informatica/ult124u500317.shtml
The EcoBlogs Network and Faça a sua parte participated in the interview. Sylvia Ferrari, Jorge Cordeiro and I made our contribution.
My participation:
Denise Rangel, Sturm und Drang blog (drang.com.br/blog), gives environmental tips, shows how to recycle batteries, for example, and encourages sustainable attitudes, such as building a mini home vegetable garden and cutting down on car use. “I’ve been trying to inform, discuss and spread new ideas in order to encourage more people to rethink their habits and concepts and choose to lead a healthier life, in harmony with the environment,” she says.
Read this post at the Sturm Und Drang blog: Entrevista na Folha
Straight from the Official Google Blog… The company owned by Pinky and the Brain swears that they only think green, that they will be a “carbon neutral” company and that they have a public plan that everybody can follow. I couldn’t resist so I went there to do some digging…
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Hundreds of millions of users access their services every day, and handling this traffic (many terabytes of data transfers) requires many computers. It’s not an easy equation: making the best use of energy and providing a good service to everybody. They began their efforts to make this structure as sustainable as possible ten years ago. Today they believe that their data centers are the most sustainable in the world—and this is what they will state at CeBit, in Hannover, Germany, at the beginning of March.
Take a look at the graph that they present
Their history is based on five main points:
1. Minimize electricity used by servers
How? (Free translation of the site content) We took away all of the unnecessary parts, such as the graphic chips. We also optimized our rack servers to use coolers (fans) as little as possible. In addition, they are set to rotate only as fast as necessary to maintain a stable server temperature. We encourage all of our suppliers (all of them) to produce components that operate efficiently, whether they are idle or operating at full or minimum capacity.
2. Reduce the energy used by the data-center facilities as a whole.
Data-center is a fancy name for a warehouse-like building that holds thousands of servers. Since these machines consume loads of electricity, they require a great deal of electrical equipment to power the servers, including power generators to supply energy in case of a power failure. Typically, 10 to 20 percent of this energy is wasted. Our first goal is to eliminate this loss.
All of the energy that goes into a data-center ends up as heat, that’s why there are fans, pumps and lots of air-conditioners to eliminate all of this heat. In many data centers, cooling alone is responsible for 20 to 70 percent of the energy consumption. Fortunately, there is an easier way to solve this problem: let water evaporate.
This is how our body maintains its temperature when the outside temperature exceeds 36 degrees Celsius. How? Energy changes water into vapor. This energy is heat, which removed from the surroundings causes a cooling effect. This is how Google’s data centers work. Below is a simple representation of their cooling towers:
Cooling towers
When this set-up isn’t enough, chillers go into action—and they consume much more energy—not to mention water… With these towers, Google’s data centers spend most of their time running in a mode called “free cooling.” This means the chillers are off. Of course, free cooling isn’t technically “free,” but it is much less expensive and more efficient.
This is why their data centers consume (at least this is my understanding… you might want to check) 16% energy, while the EPA can use up to 96%… This meant a lot of work, but they were able to reduce their environmental footprint—while lowering their costs.
Note from Ladybug: Why was it again that I didn’t buy their stocks when I could have?
3. Conserve water by using recycled water for refrigeration.
In the United States, this energy savings has a counterpart: for every kW saved, two gallons of water are also saved. This means that those guys were also able to save a lot of drinking water. And more: by the end of 2008, two facilities were already running on 100 percent recycled water. Their new goal is to have 80% of their total water consumption made up of recycled water in ALL of their data centers by 2010 (next year). To get there, anything goes: industrial sewage, rainwater, city sewage. They treat it and dump it in the cooling towers… Just a small detail: the location of the Belgian data center was chosen due to the possibility of using recycled water…
Note from Ladybug: aren’t these guys smart?
4. Reuse or recycle all electronic equipment that leaves the data centers.
Wow, they reuse or recycle 100% (everything) that leaves the data centers. According to the EPA in the United States, the average is only 18%. Everything else goes to landfills… (good heavens!) According to them, 68% of the material is reused right there. The rest is sent to institutions that need computing equipment. Some parts, however, can’t be reused. What now, uncle Google? They are sent to resellers. Note: these companies must sign a document promising to adopt fair and socially responsible labor practices and a zero tolerance policy for e-waste, landfills, incineration, or export to developing countries.   Their commitment is to the sustainable management of their computing infrastructure during the entire lifecycle of each machine.
5. Engage our peers in the use of smarter energy practices.
To do this, Google has adopted the Climate Savers Smart Computing initiative—created by the company and Intel in 2007—which started in the spirit of WWF climate savers and led dozens of business to reduce their carbon emissions by showing them that this is a great business.  The goal of CSSC is to promote the development and the adoption of technologies that are able to increase computers’ energy efficiency and reduce their energy consumption while they are idle. Is their mission possible? Reduce their computers’ energy consumption in 50% by 2010 (next year…)
And it gets better: They encourage the use of renewable energies (which are a minority in the US, let’s not forget this), have a guide to help we poor mortal consumers to select efficient machines, and have a whole lot of other cool campaigns, such as Power Down the Planet, which invites college students to reduce their energy consumption…
Tip from Nospheratt.
Read this post at the Ladybug Brasil Blog: Google swears that it is green
Barium, beryllium, cadmium. Anyone who is not a chemist knows little about these elements—except, perhaps, that they were part of the old periodic table, from high school. Although they seem exotic and unusual, these and other heavy metals are used in the majority of electronic devices that abound in our daily lives. They make cell phone batteries last longer or prevent computers from exploding.
While they are new, machines and other technological tools usually cause us little damage—nothing much more than stress and annoyance. But when they become obsolete, pile up in landfills or are incinerated, we can see features of our electronic devices that were not specified in the user’s manual: their heavy metals decompose and contaminate the soil, the air and the water. This may bring about health problems that range from fetus malformation to serious neurologic consequences, kidney failure and cancer.
Behind those computers financed in 24 installments, free cell phones, increasingly powerful MP3 players and other electronic gadgets sold by next to nothing there is a cheap, disposable and toxic technology. To give you an idea of the problem, according to Greenpeace, every year, 50 million tons of chips, circuits, boards, computers, cell phones and other cyberparaphernalia are thrown away. This is such a huge number that it is almost unimaginable. If all of the electronic waste we generate every year were put on a train, its railway cars would circle the world—and even so, it’s hard to imagine so much waste.
The useful life of electronic gadgets is lessened in inverse proportion to which the increase in their consumption. In 1997, a personal computer used to last for over half a decade. In 2005, a computer was already considered obsolete after two years of use. Today, after only a few months any device can be considered an antique.
Throughout the world, technology companies are trying to change their image as polluters and struggling to decrease their environmental impact. Since 2005, many of them have started collecting their own used equipment in order to reuse raw-materials on the assembly lines. This is a modest move, but it involves a radical change in the way they think about their business.
*Full version of the article written in collaboration with Bruna Menegueço, reporter, published in Gestão Empresarial magazine.
Read this post at the Guindaste blog: Technology in the green trend
Braskem was one of the recipients of the Environmental Responsibility Award granted during the 2009 Global Plastics Environmental Conference (GPEC) which was promoted by the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE). The Brazilian petrochemical industry—that’s right, how surprising is that—was awarded as a result of their “Plastic materials made of renewable resources” project.
We are talking about a polyethylene—or plastic—created from sugarcane ethanol. According to an article that I read on Terra’s website, the product is the result of a 90% of ethylene and 10% of butylene composition; these gases are obtained from processed sugarcane.
Two years ago, I was researching this product for an article to be published in the design magazine I used to work for. At that time, the press relations team stated that, starting in 2009, this product would be produced on an industrial scale.
The company is building a plant in Triunfo, which if I’m not mistaken is situated in the state of Pernambuco. From what I’ve been reading, despite initial forecasts, it will only be up and running in 2010. They intend to produce up to 200,000 tons of the product per year.
According to Braskem, multinational companies from several industries—including the cosmetic industry—are interested. After all, the product is made of 100 per cent renewable raw materials. There is just one problem—how much will we have to plant to produce this much?
Read this post at the Xis-Xis blog: Where is the green plastic?
- Do you have Motorola batteries?
- Batteries?
- Yes. My cell’s battery is too weak, it can’t last a whole day.
- What is the model?
- This one.
- But this cell phone is not that old…
- Yes! Those batteries don’t last a single day!
- Why don’t you buy a new cell phone?
- Why? My cell is working perfectly. It’s just the battery that doesn’t work.
- Look, I don’t even have this kind of battery here, to sell.
- So, take it from a new cell phone.
- I can’t. You have to buy the whole cell.
- Where do I find only the battery?
- It’s complicated…
- What do you mean by that?
- That it is easier for you to change your phone.
- Wow, that’s amazing: a salesman trying to push me a completely unnecessary sale!
- I know it looks like salesman bullshit… But I’ll show you it’s true. Give me your SSN for me to check how many points you have to redeem.
- Can I buy a new battery with them?
- In theory, yes, you could, but they stopped sending single batteries here. Nobody buys them. It’s a lot cheaper to change the whole phone. Look: you have 943 points to redeem. You can take an excellent phone with those points, with digital camera, mp3, video recorder…
- But a battery, that’s what I need…?
- No. This battery used to cost R$199 last time I received it, some months ago.
- That’s expansive!
- Didn’t I tell you?
- What if I take it to the service assistant?
- They’ll charge you that at least. Because you can’t fix a battery, you have to change it. It runs out.
- But my phone isn’t 2 years old!
- Yes. But this is made not to last, for you to, in a few months, want to change. And, tell me, only a stupid person would prefer an old phone when you can take a brand new one for free.
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