Wireless Ways to Go Green
by David Pescovitz
 Printer-friendly
version
Arpad Horvath is director of the UC Berkeley Consortium on Green Design and Manufacturing. (courtesy the researcher)
|
Sitting down on a Sunday morning with a hot cup of coffee and the New York Times may save a tremendous amount of wear-and-tear on the environment -- as long as you're reading all the news that's fit to print on your personal digital assistant. In a new study, UC Berkeley researchers report that receiving your news wirelessly on a PDA instead of delivered to your door requires up to 140 times less carbon dioxide, several orders of magnitude less greenhouse gases, and the consumption of 26 to 67 times less water.
"I'm interested in the environmental effects of infrastructure, but not just roads, bridges, and transportation systems," says civil and environmental engineering professor Arpad Horvath. "In the last 10 years, the Internet has become a very important part of our societal infrastructure. But we haven't come to terms with what that means for environmental impact."
For example, Horvath explains, wireless information technologies have long been hyped for their potential to reduce society's overall environmental impact. The reality though is that there are very few hard numbers supporting those claims, he says.
"The conjecture is that the Internet and wireless is great for the environment," says Horvath, co-founder of the Network for Energy, Environment, Efficiency, and the Information Economy (N4E), a research center based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Sure, if you substitute a teleconference for a trip across the country or read the news online, it saves energy. But exactly how much?"
To tease out the truth, Horvath and graduate student Michael Toffel dissected nearly all of the environmentally-relevant processes involved in both wireless news delivery and teleconferencing. In the case of newspapers, the researchers focused on the environmental effects of reading the New York Times in Berkeley, California, from the manufacture of newsprint and ink to the delivery from a nearby printing press to disposal of the newspaper. This data was then compared to such factors as the energy used to manufacture a PDA, including its microprocessor and battery, and the electricity required by wireless and Internet service providers to deliver news content to the device.
Horvath says he was surprised by the final results. For instance, if just a quarter of newspaper readers around the country switched to reading the news on their PDA, they'd generate just two to three percent of the carbon dioxide that would have resulted from the 14 million print newspapers they no longer need.
"The young people of today are not attached to the model of reading their news in print editions," Horvath says. "Electronic news delivery is happening irrespective of its environmental impact, so there doesn't need to be any lifestyle change to create a win-win situation."
In the second part of their research, Horvath and Toffel studied the environmental implications of participating in a teleconference in lieu of a traditional business meeting. For this scenario, they compared the environmental burden of a trip from Berkeley to Chicago, including automobile and light rail commutes to and from the airport. The emissions associated with fuel consumption were calculated to compare to the energy required to manufacture and use a cellular phone and conduct a conference call on both a cell phone and landline. (The impact of building a vehicle, roads, and airports was excluded.)
Again, the researchers expected that teleconferencing would prove to be greener than travel, but they were shocked by the size of the difference. A round trip between offices in Berkeley and Chicago releases more than 600 kilograms of carbon dioxide while a wireless meeting results in just 1.3 kilograms. Meanwhile, more energy efficient cell phones and chargers on the horizon will further reduce the environmental impact of wireless technology.
"To get a sense of the magnitude of the results, a company that converts 100 meetings a month to wireless teleconferences would reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 720 megagrams (720,000 kilograms) per year," they write.
Even if there are uncertainties about the accuracy of the raw data, Horvath explains, the differences are so huge in both the newspaper and business travel studies that the environmental benefits of wireless information technology is clear for these two activities.
"All we can hope is that people see the data so they can make their own informed decisions," Horvath says. "You can't argue with the numbers."
Arpad Horvath's home page
Mike Toffel's Homepage
Environmental Implications of Wireless Technologies: News Delivery and Business Meetings (PDF)
Network for Energy, Environment, Efficiency, and the Information Economy (N4E)
UC Berkeley Consortium on Green Design and Manufacturing
Lab Notes is
published online by the Public Affairs Office of the UC Berkeley
College of Engineering. The Lab Notes mission is to illuminate groundbreaking
research underway today at the College of Engineering that will
dramatically change our lives tomorrow.
Media contact: Teresa
Moore, Lab Notes editor, Director of Public Affairs
Writer, Researcher: David
Pescovitz
Web Manager: Michele
Foley
Subscribe or send comments to the Engineering Public Affairs
Office: lab-notes@coe.berkeley.edu.
© 2004 UC Regents.
Updated 8/31/04.
|
