When computing cleans up its act
Small as today's computers are, their environmental impact keeps getting bigger. Computers use huge amounts of electric power and are built from toxic chemicals that can wind up tainting our land and water. David Douglas, vice president for eco-responsibility at Sun Microsystems Inc., spoke with Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray about his company's commitment to clean computing.
Q Why is Sun making an issue of this?
A Computers are taking a bigger and bigger piece of our energy pie. We rely on them for a lot of our economy, much of our business, and even how we shop these days. In the US, the data centers that sit behind all those Web queries you do and the YouTube videos are 200 billion kilowatt-hours, which is getting to be a decent fraction of our overall power use.
Q So companies can get big energy cost savings by using more efficient computers?
A Even the ones who aren't quite ready to jump in with both feet into the environmental side of things are finding that it's getting to be a bigger and bigger piece of their budget. In many cases, they're just out of space in their data centers to add more computers, in which case, can I pack more in at lower power?
Q How does Sun's new Project Blackbox help with that?
A It's a data center in a shipping container. There's eight standard racks in there. You can put any kind of servers and storage and networking gear in. It's got all integrated power and cooling, and so we're able to make it very efficient. You just need a source of electricity and something to do with warm water, to chill it.
Q How does Project Blackbox save on energy costs?
A It's highly efficient. Today in a data center, somebody came and designed the room, somebody else designed the power, somebody else designed the cooling, and then somebody finally put computers in. We've got a chance in this to design it as a very integrated system. We blow air through one computer, immediately through a radiator to get the heat back out of it before it goes into the next one.
Q Will you come up with energy efficiency standards for computers?
A We are working within the standards organizations to help get the equivalent of the miles-per-gallon sticker on the cars. Today it's very hard, if I look at two servers, to know what it's going to cost me to actually run them. So we're working with a lot of folks in the industry and the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) to get some standards.
Q I understand Sun also saves energy by encouraging workers to stay at home.
A We've had savings from our Open Work program of $60 million last year. Forty-six percent of employees have signed up for the program, which means they're giving up their permanent office in exchange for support. We pay for their DSL line and help them get equipment at home. They get a piece of a time-shared office so they can come in, and there's offices available to use for the day.
Q How do you deal with e-waste?
A We will take back products we sell anywhere in the world. It doesn't cost anything. We don't pay shipping on it. You have to get it to us.
In Europe, where we get the most stuff back, over half of what we get back, we're able to reuse pieces of it. So we'll take the fans out. We can use those in refurbished computers. As for the rest of it, everything but 5 percent we're able to recycle.
Q Won't you have to design computers for easy recycling?
A We're spending a lot of time right now on our design process about how do you take this computer that isn't even designed yet and make it easier to take apart at the end of its life. You really want to have pure plastic and pure metal at the end, because you can recycle those for more. If I have metal with some plastic on it, I get less from the recycler for that. So how can I attach them so they can easily come back apart?
Our competitors are starting to do this kind of stuff, too. It's really a trend in the industry.
