Brampton Factor: IT and the environment - friend or foe?

Computers and other IT hardware aren't being recycled and use up loads of energy - and there appears to be no end in sight to this inefficient behaviour, says Martin Brampton.

While most of us enjoy long hot summers, the overall impact of global warming is a serious concern. And there is little sign that we will deal with it until we are faced with disaster. IT is by no means an innocent bystander in all this.

Are people changing their lifestyles to deal with environmental issues? The evidence is pretty flimsy. Surveys indicate that a lot of people have been persuaded not to leave their TV sets on standby. Most people have fitted a few low consumption lamps. Many claim to have turned down the heating but without validation that must be doubtful. How many have turned it up again since being polled?

But these changes are so superficial as to be laughable as a response to crisis. It is obvious they have little impact on lifestyle and changes such as reducing travel simply are not happening. Despite much talk, planners are still looking at ways to accommodate more vehicle journeys and ever more airline passengers.

In the world of IT, the temptation is to fall into the comfortable idea that working with computers is at worst pretty harmless and at best a fine way to search for solutions to critical problems. Unfortunately, such cosy assumptions turn out to be unwarranted. Yet both within IT and in life more generally, it seems there will be no real change in attitude until people are faced with much more immediate threats.

Complacency is the most obvious feature in current attitudes to IT and the environment. Up-to-date figures on environmental costs are hard to come by, for the simple reason that next to nothing new has been published in the last couple of years. But we can be reasonably confident that the factors involved in creating computers have not changed very much in that time.

The Environment Agency reports that the amount of electrical and electronic waste increases each year by 80,000 tonnes in the UK. And the last time figures were available, the average PC required 10 times its own weight in fuel and chemicals during manufacture - not to mention a tonne and a half of clean water. For comparison, things like cars and refrigerators use up one to two times their own weight in fuel and generally last a lot longer.

The problem is not just in the home. Rapid growth of the internet has driven the creation of huge server centres. There, not only do systems consume large amounts of power but roughly the same power again is needed to keep temperatures within bounds for the machines to perform.

Repeated delays have postponed European action to hold manufacturers responsible for recycling products. Perhaps that is not such a bad thing because there are arguments both against recycling and against holding the PC makers responsible.

The most obvious problem with recycling is that it fails to solve the problems to any significant degree. Most of the components in equipment that is thrown away are incapable of being reused because they are technically and economically obsolete. About all that recycling achieves is to recover small quantities of especially valuable materials such as gold from connectors.

The difficulty with putting responsibility on the PC makers is neatly illustrated by Dell's announcement of reduced profits. Hardware building is a cut-throat business. It is so intensive that IBM quit by selling most of its PC interests to China. Now Dell, long thought to have the key to selling PCs profitably, is showing that nobody finds it easy.

Software makers are mostly in a much better financial position and also perhaps the root of many problems. The extra processing power created year after year by advances in hardware seems to be more than consumed by ever larger software. We've all laughed at the comment that 640KB should be enough for anyone. Today my PC is running with more than 800MB in use. Is it really delivering more than a thousand times as much benefit as the old IBM PC?

But the biggest problem is that we have no idea how to control the factors that keep us moving along this potentially catastrophic path. The received wisdom is that the market delivers the best answers to questions about what should be produced. It is hardly clear, though, whether the market has an eye on the future.

Recycling is vastly inferior to reusing or upgrading hardware. But the rational consumer is faced with problems. For example, the price of adding memory to old computers can be double the price of the latest memory. By and large, upgrading might make us feel good but is simply not economic. Software makes matters far worse. Much the cheapest way to buy Microsoft Windows or Office is to purchase a new computer and include the software in the deal. This alone can be sufficient economic justification for throwing out a computer that is still working.

Over the years, there have occasionally been 'future proof' computer designs. Where are they now? On scrap heaps every one. Nobody has had any success in finding ways to set standards that will last long enough to see computers wearing out before they become obsolete. Of course, some people talk about giving away these old, working computers. But the supposed recipients mostly do not want them because the same imperatives apply to them as to everyone else.

If we are confined to shaping behaviour through consumption that is more or less based on rational economic choices, then only taxation can lead us to change. Schemes that add a small amount to the price of electronic goods to pay for shipping them off to third world countries when we have finished with them are no solution.

To be effective, we need to see changes in the whole way we tackle technological development. We need to work through economic factors in a way that could only happen with a scheme of considerable sophistication and over a period of years. There is no sign that politicians are adequately aware of the issues yet, let alone have the political will to create solutions with real impact.

Meanwhile, it seems that the average consumer will avoid leaving the TV on standby but will buy enough extra electronic gadgets over the next few years to see continuing increases in power consumption - at least until something really nasty happens to make us change our ways.