"For some parts of the world, technology has come to deliver longer lives, better health and greater conveniences. However, that progress has also come at a cost to other parts of the world. We live in an era of cheap, disposable electronic consumer goods, and it's taken its toll on places where products are made before they're delivered to you, and where they go after they're tossed aside for the next big thing."
"NEC says that it has developed a new form of bio-plastic that could be used for mobile phones and is 70% made from a mixture of cellulose, a main component of plant stems, with cardanol, a primary component of cashew nut shells."
"My work as a Forrester analyst is focused on helping strategists at IT suppliers (vendors) align their development, positioning, and messaging with the big trends and disruptions in the industry. Mobility, cloud computing, globalization ... trends at that high altitude. Over the last three years or so, that has included sustainability as it has appeared on and risen higher the strategy agenda of companies around the world."
"All carbon footprints are hard or impossible to pin down accurately, but the internet is a particularly complex case. This isn't just due to the fact that the "net" consists of millions or even billions of machines owned by countless people and companies. There's also another problem: even if we knew exactly how much energy all these devices consumed (which we don't), we still wouldn't know how much of that energy was spent on offline jobs (such as creating documents in Microsoft Office) and how much was spent on online jobs (such as emailing those documents to a friend or colleague). "
"Green computing or green IT, refers to environmentally sustainable that is sustainability is the capacity to last forever computing or IT. It is “the study and practice of designing, manufacturing, using, and disposing of computers, servers, and associated subsystems—such as monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and communications systems."
"When cicadas' endless singing start functioning as an alarm clock in the morning, cosmopolitans start packing their suitcases and wonder, 'Would my phone be smart enough to work in overseas? What about the chargers?' Smart world is questioning whether the information technology started as a global "product". In the process of shifting islands of intelligent technology to the world of intelligent technology, one inevitable step is to meet a global standard."
"With E-waste collections becoming more commonplace, you may want to do the right thing and recycle your old computer instead of throwing it away and adding to the landfill.
But what to do about all that information on your hard drive?
Mark Ashe, general manager at Mega Computers , says for your own peace of mind the best thing to do is remove the hard drive and destroy it before taking the computer to the E-waste collection.
Ashe notes this means physically removing the hard drive and drilling a hole through it. He adds this is the best route to take to make sure all your data is really gone. "