Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Think Green Go Green

These are some the URL’s that I browsed that talk about “Green Campus Computing”

http://www.dailyutahchronicle.com/news/campus-computing-comes-up-green-1.345643

This site talks about Center works to safety disposal of e-waste. E-wastes or Electronic wastes are those discarded, surplus, obsolete, broken, electrical or electronic devices. These waste cause great health and pollution problem because of the fact that these machines contain serious contaminants that could harm a persons health. In this site, it talks about how a certain organization can address this issue or situation. Andrew Reich, an IT architect was the one who explained the solution to this problem and said that the solutions are simple. In the bigger view, the solution is to have a group or a committee in an organization that will evaluate and check the sustainability of the electronic products in your organization, this way they can evaluate if a certain electronic devices that can still be salvaged and resold and the wastes shall be handled by guaranteed recycle experts so that the wastes can be managed properly, this design is called “Cradle-to-Cradle”. Our university can also adopt this design. The school could come up with a group or committee that would regularly check and evaluate the electronic devices of the school especially in the laboratories. If the devices in the laboratories can still meet the needs of the students then it does not need to be changed and if ever it needs to be replaced or upgraded then the group would know if the old machines can be resold or considered as e-wastes.

http://greencampus.winserve.org/greencampus/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=40

PUTTING YOUR COMPUTER TO SLEEP

Saving energy is one way of helping save the ecosystem and one way of saving energy is putting your computer to sleep when you’re not using your computer at the moment but you still working on something. This way the computer consumes less energy because it is in low power mode. When a computer is in low power mode the computer takes less time to wake up when you need to use it again compared to starting up from the “off” state. I believe this practice not hard to implement especially in laboratories in the university. In some cases, classes that are held in the computer laboratories are congested. For example, a class just finished their laboratory class and another class is about to use the laboratories just few minutes after the previous class so it is much better if the students will be asked to put the computers into sleep mode rather than turning it off, this way the university could save energy and lower the light bill.

http://esi.ucsd.edu/esiportal/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=228&Itemid=101

UC San Diego Campus Computing Goes Green- January 28, 2009

This sight talks about sampling of new generations of technologies that promise to help colleges make their IT departments both more efficient and more sustainable, thus, addressing the problem of soaring financial and environmental costs of information technology. One of the devices that could address this problem is called the GreenLight Instrument. This instrument will deploy sensors and software that measure energy consumption, humidity, etc.

The goal is to encourage organizations to come up with strategies that can reduce electricity consumptions. For me, the university can apply strategies without risking costly equipments. It can be done through simple things like replacing AC to DC. One other way is putting schedules that would set the computers to off state when they will not be used so that it wouldn’t consume electricity. There are many ways to address the problem of soaring financial and environment costs. It all depends on how an organization handles it to come up with a solution to the problem.

No comments: