what's in your laptop?
Mar
After buying a new carbon fiber bicycle and recommending natural latex mattresses to my friends at the Murie Center, y'all have probably figured out that I'm becoming a pretty careful shopper. So you shouldn't be surprised that I found a recent article in PC Magazine to be very interesting–even though I'm not in the market for a new computer.
What's Inside Your Laptop? tells the story of how quartz becomes a computer and is full of data that would keep the carbon calculators at Carnegie Mellon's Green Design Institute busy for quite some time. The chart below details the material composition of a typical notebook computer, and the manufacturing of each one of the 20 materials listed has a significant carbon impact. Of course, transportation adds a significant amount of carbon to the computer assembly process as well. The typical list of component manufacturing countries includes: South Korea, Japan, Thailand, China, Malaysia and the U.S. … with everything being assembled in Taiwan.
While the snapshot above is of a typical Dell laptop, I assume the materials that go into an Apple, Toshiba or Lonovo laptop are pretty similar. The point of this post isn't to recommend one brand over another; it's to encourage folks to peek under the sheets whenever you are making a major buying decision; after carefully considering, of course, how absolutely necessary your new purchase is.
more stats:
It's the end of the month and time for the March accounting of my family's steps and expenditures toward becoming carbon neutral:
$17.50 per month — to pay for 100% Green Power from Lower Valley Energy (based on 2006 usage)
$ 6.66 per month — for a Terrapass to offset our automobile driving miles (based on 17, 213 miles driven in 2006; actual miles driven in March = 680, for a total of 1670 miles driven so far this year)
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$24.16
Year-to-date investment in carbon neutrality = $133.61
Carbon Neutral Journal's stats are brought to you by Blue Spruce Cleaners.
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