The amount of e-waste in general is truly nauseating. My employer just cleaned 30 years of “junk” out of our in house IT “tech shop” and the number of working but obsolete computers that went out (many simply because they couldn’t support Windows 11) is sickening to me. The amount of carbon generated from the mining activities, steel production, etc. that went into producing “obsolete” computers has to absolutely dwarf any carbon “savings” you get by replacing them with more “efficient” machines. Especially when you consider that renewable power is taking over and many places aren’t burning coal to run the things anymore. A 12 year old i7 server runs my NVR, home automation setup, web server, and network router (not to mention a small handful of other services) without even breaking 25% CPU usage. We could replace so many data centers with old desktops.
> A 12 year old i7 server runs my NVR, home automation setup, web server, and network router (not to mention a small handful of other services) without even breaking 25% CPU usage. We could replace so many data centers with old desktops.
Replacing concentrated and highly optimized data center servers with 10-1000X as many old desktop computers idling away at 50-100W or more would be a terrible tradeoff. That would explode the energy usage by orders of magnitude.
I did the math a few years back on how long you would have to run old machines to (roughly) offset the carbon emissions instead of purchasing new hardware. This included all mining, refinement, manufacturing, shipping and electrical savings from more efficient processors.
A big part of this is the very intense amount of energy producing the silicon wafer from Quartz ingots. While they weigh only a few grams of the total machine they reside in, they have a very sizable impact on total energy.
Funnily enough, for most desktop computers it would take about 15 years of non-stop usage to manage this. That is if powered purely by Lignite/Brown Coal. Anything cleaner, so almost any other energy source, and you have to run them way longer. If purely on solar panels and their manufacturing carbon output, it moves into the centuries range.
The solar panels required energy to create, too. I don't think that it would take centuries for replacing Cray 1 with a Raspberry Pi 5 to pay for itself in carbon intensity, even if both are powered by solar panels. The Cray example is seemingly uncharitable, but the principal is the same because if the only relevant thing is solar power, then it should take centuries in that case too, right?
Unless you count in the effects of distributed solar and the environmental effects of building said datacenters in the first place. Many homes with solar produce more than they consume, and many homes pay for heat. Instead of new construction (concrete is another huge CO2 contributor) and AC units or pumping surface water for cooling, putting a server in your house is basically free heat and making use of an existing, underutilized resource.
I could run my entire rack off of one to two solar panels (decommissioned ones from a power farm might I add). Even that would take a few years to pay for itself (when you factor in the costs of mounting and permitting) and my power company over 80% renewables the last time I checked anyway.
"We could replace so many data centers with old desktops."
But I assume for way more energy costs? And the manual labour to sort out the different mainboards and make everything interoperable is not free either. But I guess it means lots of opportunity for unconventional low costs projects to scramble things together. Win 10 got another year of support, but I assume next year, even more computers will be avaiable quite cheap or for free.
See my other reply, when people count energy costs they fail to take into account the existing sunk cost of producing said resources, and the energy from having to build out new infrastructure to create these “more efficient” datacenters.
It’s like when people replace their fridge with a “more efficient” one and wipe out any energy savings with the cost of the new fridge. The difference in energy use will not pay for the new fridge for many years and by then you’ve already replaced the new fridge with another newer “better” one.
The only energy cost that matters is to the operator. Old hardware costs more to run so why would I run it? That there was energy used to produce the device and the replacement is literally not a factor in the calculation.
you have to go for TCO to justify upgrades. energy alone most of the time doesn't justify replacing old hardware.
factor in space (=rent), age related increase in failure rate (=servicing), computer power needs (=opportunity costs) then together with the energy needs you find good points in time to justify an upgrade.
No company in america is going to do this. These cheap asses will definitely won't pay 60/hr to an army of tecnhicians to macguyver together new servers from old trash. We would need to have a madmax level catastrophe where supply chains collapse to have this make economic sense. The labor is the biggest cost. I exclusively use clusters of old computer for all my stuff and honestly, it sucks yo. Everything break all the time
I suspect that if there was any reasonable amount of economic advantage to using old hardware we would see multiple organizations systematically building large datacenters out of the free hardware.
As a hobbyist, I would love to get my hands on more stuff like this. But I don’t see how it could be used for anything at scale.
Not sure how reassuring it is to you, but these computers often have a longer life on the used market, even resold multiple times. The laptops in my Hungarian household always come used, simply because they are selling here capable machines in beautiful condition, below 50% of the original market price. And when we need something new, they get resold as well.
Now of course, there are the videos from third world countries where they burn e-waste for gold, so it's not all dandy, but hey. At least we can be a little more conscious.
This you can apply to almost everything we have been doing in the last 50 years I guess.
We're constantly being told to buy new because 1) more energy efficient, 2) better in terms of safety, 3) more environmental friendly, 4) it was built with unhealthy materials, 5) a single component is harder to replace later it with more modern xyz, if you don't replace the entire system the component is part of, 6) costs are increasing, so do it now!
You just need to understand which of the items above is essential for you, impossible to say no to.
In some cases but the economics need to be improved. Companies don’t have to pay for the externalities so it’s often cheaper to build new things instead of recycling, but if that shifted we’d see a lot more capacity arise.
I don’t think we’ve really figured out how to handle international shipping being so cheap. If there were mountains of nominally-recyclable stuff building up in Hoboken, I think we’d have some kind of tax or regulatory fix because it’s harder to ignore a problem which is that easy to document. When it’s being sent through four levels of subcontractor on the other side of an ocean, people can just choose not to see problems which don’t obviously affect their kids but whose fixes would raise prices.
I think this is only going to get worse worse, as phones, tablets and PCs are broadly a solved problem these days (outside intensive tasks). Literally nothing wrong with the 15 year old imac I have except for apple no longer supporting the OS.
If a laptop costs 1000 dollars to buy, it couldn't have used more than 1000 dollars worth of hydrocarbons to create, unless firms are operating at a loss, right? Yes, the laptop required mining lithium, mining steel, turning hydrocarbons into plastics, growing silicon crystals, photolithography for the chips, running the conveyor belts for the assembly lines, etc and all those things required electricity and the electricity was mostly provided by fossil fuels, but the total amount of fossil fuels used (when considering price) couldn't have exceeded the cost of the laptop, because that would mean that some firms are spending more on fuel than they're receiving in profit, and such firms in the general case don't survive long. So if you take the cost of the laptop and then convert that to the mix of hydrocarbons used for energy at the time of the product's manufacture, that gives you an absolute upper bound of how much embodied carbon that thing must represent. It also gives you a lower bound of how efficient something has to be before you've paid for the old thing being thrown out and the new thing being manufactured.
So consider this: you have a desktop from 2010, it cost 1000 dollars, and operated at 150 watts. You consider getting a laptop today for 500 dollars, and it would have twice the nominal performance and operates at 50 watts. The total amount of embodied carbon for both of those devices has to be less than $1,500 worth of carbon dioxide produced by hydrocarbons. It can't be higher than that. Then you consider the running cost of 150 watts per hour vs 50 watts per hour. Well, back in 2010, 1000 (2010) dollars could buy you about 6000 to 9000 kilowatt hours worth of electricity when adjusting for conversion rates and electricity cost in China. Today, 500 dollars can buy about 3500 to 6500 kilowatt hours depending on whether you're buying in the US or China. So in order for the embodied carbon to be paid off for the laptop vs the desktop, let's take 7500 kilowatts for the desktop (a fair midpoint) plus 5000 kilowatts for the laptop, and then divide that by the running difference in power of the two systems: 100 watts. So if you plan on operating the laptop continuously for 13 years, the carbon savings from the efficiency gain of the new device would offset any possible carbon generated from the old device. But the laptop is twice as powerful, and what I gave was an absolute upper bound, and cannot be taken as a good ballpark estimate for how much carbon was actually produced. In the example that I gave, there was a 15-year age difference between the old system and the new system. Depending on how the devices were used, it's reasonable to assume that the right time to have replaced the desktop was back in 2023. Depending on how you use your device, it may never end up paying itself off before using less carbon than the older device. Waste is possible. But if the new device is on longer than 125,000 hours, it will have. It's just a sanity check, but it's good to have an upper bound.
Well luckily according to Bill Gates the climate is not really an issue anymore [1]:
> There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this:
> In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us—just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.
> Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise.
Note that this is from someone who used to be one of the most focal "doomsday viewers", see for example [2] or [3].
Please also cite where he allegedly said that it's a doomsday event before you put up the strawman and debunk it with "look even this guy changed his mind"
Edit:
The only concrete thing I've found in trying to seek through your tedious video links for 10 minutes (idk why I'm spending my time on this but here we are) is the claim that, instead of living healthily, we'd be "constantly dealing with the human and financial crises at a historic scale". That's in line with the text you've quoted: it'll not be the end of all humans but it's a serious consequence for all of us (but not evenly distributed, even if it affects everyone to some degree)
Sorry, I didn’t double check indeed. I posted the wrong TED talk from him, see [1] at 4:21. There he says we need to limit climate change by limiting population growth. I think this is quite a hypocritical stance from someone who flies private jet all year.
New strawman! Now it's no longer "Gates changed his mind on it being an existential crisis" but "Gates wants population control"
The source again doesn't check out. He says:
- the formula at ~4:21: more people use more energy (I think that stands to reason)
- you hear laughter as he then says "one of these factors [in the formula] will have to get pretty near to zero". It seems exceedingly obvious to me that the next slide being about the people term of the formula is either a joke (and recognised as such by the other listeners) or a mistake about switching the slide too soon. If this is your evidence that Bill Gates wanted to solve climate by eradicating populations, it's going to need to be backed up somewhere else, preferably also by actions as he has put a lot of his money where his mouth is, that shouldn't be hard to find tangible evidence of
- 4:47 mentions how much we could reduce population growth by e.g. offering condoms and pills to people that otherwise don't have access to them, and by offering vaccinations to people that can't afford them (since better survival of parents causes lower birth rate)
As for whether it's hypocritical that he flies jets (to an unspecified amount), idk, if I could offset my emissions to negative a gigaton per year then I'd also feel like I'm doing my bit. It would still be better if he didn't fly, I can see how one calls him a hypocrite for that part and perhaps even agree, but in this context it seems like yet another angle to this argument seemingly designed to hate him no matter what he really says and does
Excellent reply. Having children is great, but no one can deny that when we had ours, times were different in almost every way. Our grandchildren have much more to think about and different ways to think about it. Governments, on the other hand, look at families with an agenda in mind. (As in future tax payers, soldiers and consumers. Personal freedoms be damned, like the over turning of RvW.) Population growth in my lifetime has not been good in almost every way. The lack of all birth control (if some governments have their way) will threaten all future generations.
