| Notebook vs. laptop! |
| Wednesday, 29 August 2007, Written by Julien | |
|
I had a discussion tonight with a friend, who was arguing that my notebook (I mean an antique notebook made with paper) was not good for environment, compared to a laptop used for the same things. He said something like: "Haaah! You use a notebook! How many trees did you destroy for that? How can you say you want to protect environment? You should use modern tools such as a notebook on your laptop!" I was quite sure it is better to use a notebook for the things I use it for: at any time, writing meeting notes, keeping my todo list, writing some ideas... I missed some striking arguments, so I had to go deeper in investigations and calculations. Now, the result is clear: If I was taking notes on my laptop instead of on my antique notebook, I would emit 5500% more CO2!  It is a bit surprising still, because computers are often presented as the solution against paper consumption! What do you think? To be precise, here below are my hypothesis:
As I have my laptop anyway, I try yo know if using my notebook is good or bad in term of CO2 emissions. To do that, we need to compare the CO2 impact of my notebook vs. the impact of using my laptop for 2 more hours a day. Emission of CO2 due to my notebook:
Emission of CO2 due to my laptop if I use it 2 more hours a day:
I do not consider other impacts on environment than CO2, because I miss data. It is clear anyway that producing electricity also consumes lots of water and have a direct impact on environment (acid rains...). Comments
juli wrote :
thanks for the precisions xuedi!
xuedi wrote :
I think its not really about CO2, the permanent environment destruction to get te materials is much more important.
Notebook: The wood grows and take back the same CO2 as it produce if you throw you notebook away later. So for the notebook its just the question of a nice policy of how to get the wood (renewable, environment friendly). and this is the point in china. Remember the growing desert problem because of the get all trees in the last 20 years. Anyway now it seems to get better, the forests are needed to fight against the desert and China spend a lot to rebuild.
xuedi wrote :
compare to the
Laptop: Your Source: Empreinte écologique du papier, Bolloré, might be correct for the CO2 fact, BUT if you thing about how this 1000 differed materials get produced, the copper mines in Africa, where thousand's of kilometer of land get destroyed for century's, cheap gold production witch leaves specially in the 3 world witch leaves ton's of dangerous material like quicksilver to ground water, the chemical disasters of plastic manufacturing in India. And so on, but mostly the rubbish waste for hundreds of years, until the material 'disappear', even a good recycling just helps a bit (thing about china ^^) Anyway to much details to check for a fair compare! greetings from BLUG mate xuedi
Roberto Polo wrote :
Nice.
But your blog won't stay long ranking high on Google if you invite us to favor the use of notebooks/magazines/newspapers rather than laptops !! By the way, when you'll have to move back to France, it'll be much more energy consuming to carry 100kg of paper that 5kg of laptop.. Of course it's worst if you take less paper back but... more often ! But I guess you don't take the plane too often to France or elsewhere, do you?
Adrien wrote :
This just proves that you can prove anything and the opposite with statistics. Here's more data : there are 22 working days a month (let's say 20). Your notebook lasts 4 months, which means 80 days, and has 80 pages. So you write one page per day in 2 hours. Given the size of a notebook page (7 words per line x 20 lines = 140 words per page) and the time it takes you to write a page (2 hours) it means that your article (487 words) took you 7 hours to write. Thanks so much for the time and effort!
|
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
