Triplesourced

Just working my way through an excellent book called Confessions of an Eco Sinner by Fred Pearce. The gist of the book is that rather than just come all preachy about the state of the planet - Pearce actually takes the trouble to find out what is really going on.

The sections on IT and mobile phone recycling and disposal are excellent. Pearce really questions whether regulations such as the WEEE directive are really going to improve the e-waste problem which currently sees Britain producing about a million tonnes of e-waste a year - which equates to the weight of about 2,400 Jumbo Jets.

But rather just rubbing his chin from the safety of his study, Pearce actually goes out to see how much of this waste is transported to developing countries and broken down in dangerous conditions often by children. Delhi and Pakistan are just some of the cities where Pearce finds illegally exported e-waste being dismantle for whatever valuable parts can be scavenged.

As for the much vaunted WEEE directive, contacts that Pearce speaks to in India think that WEEE will lead to more waste exports to that country. There are obviously legitimate recycling facilities in India but also a thriving black market which unless WEEE is properly policed will see a lot of the extra waste which the legislation could generate.

The answer that Pearce finally settles on for how to dispose of his own computer is to donate it to an organisation that re-uses old computers from the UK such as Computers for Schools Kenya based in Nairobi. (which receives PCs from the UK via organisations such as Computer AId which is based in North London)

Just watching the Lib Dem's conference on BBC Parliament and Norman Lamb, Libe Dem's Health spokesman, has just laid into the NHS National Programme for IT. Hardly controversial - but this is the Lib Dem's we are talking about - as the NPfIT is estimated to cost around £12bn and has been a bit of a farce to date.

"Who would trust this government with a national database of health records," he said.

The green IT angle to this story is that the NHS, like all government organisations is trying to promote sustainable use of technology - which to some degree could mean using less new IT. Not easy to do when you are planning to spend billions on new tech.

But the alternative angle is that IT, through the use of technologies such as video-conferencing - the high end of which has been developed to into an system called Health Presence for remote diagnosis - can actually be used to tackle carbon emissions from transport.

Eco-geek.org is reporting that the search giant put out a patent application last year for a wave-powered server farm.
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/2086/

According to another article on Earth Times, the power for the sea-bound servers will come from "Pelamis wave energy converters."
http://www.fashionfunky.com/2008/09/google_turns_to_the_worlds_oce.php

No surprises that Google is taking the massive contribution that datacentres make to climate change very seriously and this sea-powered patent (if it proves accurate) follows on from the massive investment in geothermal technology the company announced last month:

Google warms to geothermal datacentre plan
http://andrewdonoghue.ning.com/profiles/blog/show?id=2217004%3ABlogPost%3A421

Before you get confused, the headline refers to the online retailer rather than the South American river system. According to the BBC, the OLPC project has teamed up with Amazon to push the Get 1 Give 1 scheme where consumers can choose to buy two of the $200 laptops - one for themselves and one for donation to a child in need.

The G1 G1 scheme was launched last November - but as with many aspects of the OLPC scheme it didn't go smoothly so is being re-launched this November with Amazon's help.

It will be interesting to see how the OLPC XO fares given the arrival of the netbook - such as the Asus Eee - a device that can probably trace its evolution directly to the OLPC ( in fact another low cost machine the Intel Classmate uses much of the same Red Hat code to run its OS as the XO).

Also the development of the touchscreen XO-2 is also worth keeping any eye on.

For more on the OLPC and energy efficient PCs check out this group test:

http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000323,39363065,00.htm

I met a BBC staffer last night and we got talking about a story I did last week about how much the BBC spends on transport - around £30m a year for the last financial year. I thought this was pretty steep - especially the £13m spent on taxis.

But as transport costs kind of come with the territory when your a media organisation sending reporters around the world, the Beeb probably deserves some latitude here and they have committed to reduce the transport costs and the resulting C02.

However the Beeb staffer said the real green story with the corporation is not with transport but with PCs and other equipment being left on overnight. This is something all of us have been guilty over time - especially given the eons it can take to power up and down Windows.

However it seems that Beeb employees are especially bad when it comes to switching off PCs and other equipment - many of them have a TV and a radio on their desk. Forgetting why with the likes of iPlayer people would need their own TV at work, this all means that many BBC staff are leaving several devices on over night for weeks at a time presumably.

The contact suggested that I should get hold of an infrared camera - and presumably a helicopter to get a picture of BBC Television centre at night - and compare it to the heat-map of the nearby housing estate to see how much energy is being burned by devices not in use.

The route of the problem is that a lot of the BBC PCs are quite old apparently - which means they might be running something like WIndows 2000 which takes an eternity to boot. I had experience of an old-school publishing company which was still running Windows 2000 which came as a bit of a shock on my first day and I was sorely tempted to leave the machine running to avoid the 15 minute delay to my day the next morning.

The Beeb has made efforts to get people to turn off PCs and my friend claims that people take notice for about a week and then things slide back to normal. Centralised PC management sounds like the way to go - and maybe a migration to Linux desktops - that way the Beeb can probably keep a lot of the same machines but run them with a more efficient OS. (software compatibility and application issues aside of course ;-))