To upgrade or to replace?

“Do I have a problem or do I have an opportunity?” asks Bram.

“Here in the frozen north we call Canada,” he explains, “it is 11 below. I leave my computers running, partially heating my house with energy that is derived about 50 percent from hydroelectric and nuclear. I figure that is better than heating the whole house with $5-per-gallon heating oil. Also, if I turned them off, they might not start again, requiring me to buy replacement computers, each at a considerable environmental cost of manufacturing. And I ride a bicycle in the summer — although I’m sure there’s a lot of energy used in the construction of a bicycle.

“Indeed,” says Bram, “nothing is simple.”

Taking a look at the entire cost — not just the dollar price — of the computers we use can throw a little more light on purchase decisions.

This is one reason, according to Jim Lynch, director of the Computer Recycling & Reuse and GreenTech Program at TechSoup, who wrote to me on the same subject, that TechSoup’s partner, Redemtech, likes “redeployment.” “Redeployment is not talked about much,” says Lynch, “but it is probably one of the highest-impact things companies can do to wring value out of IT assets.” Redeployment is simply the systematic refurbishing and reusing of assets rather than recycling and replacing them.

Lynch cites a book by Dr. Eric Williams and Ruediger Kuehr, “Computers and the Environment, Understanding and Managing Their Impacts,” which finds that “producing the average 53-pound desktop computer and CRT monitor requires 530 pounds of fossil fuels, 50 pounds of chemicals, and 3,330 pounds of water. In fact, 75 percent of PC energy consumption has already happened before a new computer is ever switched on. Adding additional life to computers saves 5 to 20 times more energy than recycling over the computer’s life cycle. It’s much better for the environment to extend the life of a computer for extra two or three years than to buy a new one every three to four years.”

Redeployment saves green in another way, too, says Lynch. “One Redemtech case study for an IT services provider recovered nearly 150,000 assets and redeployed more than 22,000 within a 15-month period. The company saved more than $1,000 per-seat on redeployments ($22 million) in total versus new procurement.”

I recently had need to upgrade a computer myself. And, while I was very tempted by speedy, brand-new desktops going for about what it costs to make a weekly excursion to the grocery store (or thereabouts), the first thing that stopped me was the hassle of disposing of my old computer. The next thing that put the brakes on this tempting purchase was this enormous waste of resources. So I did what Lynch suggests. I replaced parts: a new hard drive ($55) and 2GB of memory ($37). It’s not rocket science. In fact, it’s fairly obvious. But with a new computer going for only $300, it was not a straight-up fiscal decision.

Even these small purchases, though, have a disproportionate cost to the environment. According to The IT and Environment Initiative, a research consortium studying IT as it affects environmental issues, “At least 1,200 grams of fossil fuels and 72 grams of chemicals are needed to produce one 2-gram memory chip. The amount of environmentally sensitive materials used far belies its tiny size; fossil fuels for production are some 600 times the weight of the chip.” By comparison, the total fossil fuel needed to produce an automobile is one to two times its weight.

Still my computer now feels brand-new, and I did not (quite) consume 530 pounds of fossil fuels, 50 pounds of chemicals, and 3,330 pounds of water — or my grocery budget — getting it to my office.

Got gripes? Send them to christina_tynan-wood@infoworld.com.