[bootlegga]

Quote:

Isolde Spies lives and works to the sound of music. When she’s not listening to tunes at home or in her car, she has upbeat songs blasting from her speakers at work as she puts her clients through their paces in aqua cardio or spinning classes.

She used to have to rifle through stacks of CDs to find the music she loves, but today Ms. Spies simply taps on her iPod to pick from about 11,500 songs stored in her digital music library.

Ms. Spies cites convenience as her main reason for choosing digitized music over the hard-copy version. But there’s another benefit that she considers a nice bonus: by choosing digital music over CDs, she’s being kinder to the environment.

“Having lived in the U.K., where they're leaps and bounds ahead when it comes to looking after the environment, I’ve become very conscientious about my own carbon footprint,” she says. “So yes, it’s nice to know that downloading music provides yet another way of being helpful to the environment.”

Or does it?

While digital music may be the more environmentally benign choice over CDs – which are made primarily with aluminum and petroleum-based plastics – it is not quite as green as many people think, says Casey Harrell, a San Francisco-based IT analyst at Greenpeace International. The same goes for that other popular download: movies, which are increasingly becoming available in digital format through video streaming services such as Netflix.

“Yes, it is more environmentally damaging to move atoms rather than bits, so from that perspective you could easily say it’s more environmentally friendly to download music and save it onto an MP3 than it is to buy CDs,” says Mr. Harrell. “But at the same time, digital entertainment is not without impact on the environment, and I think most people don’t really think about that.”

Mr. Harrell points to the heavy metals and toxic chemicals – such as lead, mercury and brominated fire retardants – that go into many MP3 and DVD players. Each year, thousands of these electronic devices end up in landfills, and over time the chemicals inside leach into the soil and groundwater. It doesn’t help that consumers today tend to replace their MP3 players frequently, increasing the amount of electronic waste that goes to landfills.

Many people also don’t give any thought to the environmental impact of the giant servers that store downloadable music, says Mr. Harrell.

“These server farms are huge – the size of several soccer stadiums,” he says. “People don’t realize that every time they stream or download music or movies, that song or movie is stored somewhere, in very large data centres that use up a lot of power and produce a great deal of carbon emissions.”

In a 2006 study out of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, researchers looked at the environmental impact of downloading songs from the Internet compared with buying music CDs from a bricks-and-mortar store or an e-commerce site. They found that music downloads did lead to higher energy use and carbon dioxide emissions from Internet data flows and data centre usage.

continued at;

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-o ... le2195098/

[jeff744]

So basically, he has been stating the obvious.

[andyt]

Seems like a non-issue to me. We could just stop using electricity and be really green. Humans aren't green.

[jeff744]

andyt wrote:

Seems like a non-issue to me. We could just stop using electricity and be really green. Humans aren't green.

And that would be like calling for a mass genocide, at the current rate of improvement we will be able to offset the damage we cause within a few decades, the earth just has to hold out for the repeated breakthroughs to get to that point.

[bootlegga]

jeff744 wrote:

So basically, he has been stating the obvious.

Not really - as the rest of the article notes;

Quote:

However, these increases were more than offset by the energy use and greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production, packaging and delivery of music CDs ordered in-store or online. The study’s conclusion? Digitally delivered music has 40 per cent to 80 per cent less impact on the environment than music CDs.

So downloading is greener than buying CDs, but not as much as people usually believe.

[Mr_Canada]

Not so much an issue with downloading as with what we use to make MP3 players.

I keep all my working MP3 players. I have collected several over the years, so I can always have one when one breaks. I have one from when I was 14 that has a broken screen, half a Gig of space, and the loudest audio of any device I've ever owned.

So sure it's not 'perfectly green', no one could honestly think that it could be. What is, other than abandoning electricity entirely? How much more of a carbon footprint is created by the factories making CDs and DVDs, including the gas required to ship them around, than the data centres?

[jeff744]

Mr_Canada wrote:

Not so much an issue with downloading as with what we use to make MP3 players.

I keep all my working MP3 players. I have collected several over the years, so I can always have one when one breaks. I have one from when I was 14 that has a broken screen, half a Gig of space, and the loudest audio of any device I've ever owned.

So sure it's not 'perfectly green', no one could honestly think that it could be. What is, other than abandoning electricity entirely? How much more of a carbon footprint is created by the factories making CDs and DVDs, including the gas required to ship them around, than the data centres?

According to the source "40-80%" but I have severe doubts about the validity of that considering the source (he works for Greenpeace, not exactly shouting honesty there). I am pretty willing to bet that he overlooked a number of things that made CDs a lot nastier than digital. He also passes the image that all server farmers are the size of several football fields when in reality those are generally for giants like Google.

[Mr_Canada]

jeff744 wrote:

According to the source "40-80%" but I have severe doubts about the validity of that considering the source (he works for Greenpeace, not exactly shouting honesty there). I am pretty willing to bet that he overlooked a number of things that made CDs a lot nastier than digital. He also passes the image that all server farmers are the size of several football fields when in reality those are generally for giants like Google.

I don't understand what this article aims to accomplish...

It is contrasting digital media to physical media to point out the flaws of digital media, but in the end still touts digital media as being the best 'green choice' of the two options anyway.

So what does he want us to do when that is the conclusion? Give up on both physical and digital media in favour of some green extremism?

I'm kinda lost. The article just made me feel better about using digital media.

I'll give them one thing: I won't brag that it's 'environmentally friendly' as my underlying reason. Never did anyway.

[2Cdo]

Downloaded music still sounds like shit when compared to good old-fashioned vinyl!

[peck420]

When people see what the 'waste disposal' areas assigned to cpu, memory, and ssd manufacturing I highly doubt they will say that it was ever green.

All forms stopped being green the day they required a chip or a circuit board to operate.

You want green, bring back the vinyl with the hand crank player.

If not, live with the fact that technology is an environmental disaster well hidden in far off places.

[jeff744]

peck420 wrote:

When people see what the 'waste disposal' areas assigned to cpu, memory, and ssd manufacturing I highly doubt they will say that it was ever green.

All forms stopped being green the day they required a chip or a circuit board to operate.

You want green, bring back the vinyl with the hand crank player.

If not, live with the fact that technology is an environmental disaster well hidden in far off places.

Actually, a lot of computer parts are recycled, increasing material prices have made it financially feasible to take apart computer chips and the like to get the copper, gold, etc and reuse it. The issue isn't the chips themselves, it's getting people to recycle the damned things for once.

[peck420]

I was talking more about the waste of the manufacturing process rather than the part itself.

Just for the CPU, the PCB, and the LCD (LED should help here a bit), you are looking at 334 kg of fossil fuels and 24.8 kg of hazardous chemicals.
(per a University of Guelph study 2005 http://www.uoguelph.ca/isc/documents/050602environcs_000.pdf)

These are non recyclable.

These are also only a few of the many parts in a computer.

They will get those numbers down, but we are a very long ways away from 'green computing'.