Is going digital helping us go green?
We recycle at home. Paper, plastic, glass, garbage. It really wasn’t too hard to do, it just took a shift in attitude and a little more work. Now, instead of throwing everything “in the trash”, we have four separate containers: one for trash, one for plastic, one for papers, and one for glass. We’re starting a compost pile (because we’re planting a vegetable and herb garden this year) so now we’re going to even recycle our garbage. We’re taking baby steps to lessen our personal footprint on this earth.
That got me to thinking about what the world is doing to “go paperless”, to digitize more items and have them available online. I mean, look at the newspapers that have gone strictly to the Internet. More and more libraries, newspapers, historical societies etc., are taking their documents, newspapers, photos, platt maps, you name it, and recording a digital image of the item. Some do this in the mistaken impression that they are preserving the item for future viewing. Relying on computers for digital preservation is misguided and ill-advised. Think about a thousand year old document. Assuming it has been preserved (there’s that word again) properly, and it hasn’t been destroyed by a natural disaster or an act of vandalism, we can still read it. Think about that file you stored on an 8 1/2 floppy disk 15 years ago. Good luck finding a computer that can read it! Microfilm is still the best media for preserving documents.
So you’ve gone digital. Your company stores all its records on the corporate servers. Emails exchange between workers. Documents fly back and forth in digital space. Contracts are signed, scanned, and sent digitally. You’re going paperless. You’re saving all those trees. We’re going green! But are you, really?
Think of the power required to keep those servers running. What about the power required to keep the separate heating and cooling units running that are needed to keep the servers from melting? I can already hear some of you. You’re going, “But we outsource our data storage and server farms to another company.” Great! Now your CFO can point to lower energy consumption, which means the marketing guys have something they can blow the corporate horn about. But think about it; all you’ve really done is bury some of your energy consumption in a service contract.
There really is no way around the growth in our usage of computers. On a personal note, our company would die if we had to lose our servers. Our servers are our lifeblood. A good portion of who we are is the inventory, the images of newspaper pages, that we have online. The digital age is upon us and there is no going back. What we can do, individually and corporately, is be better stewards of what we can manage. Do online presentations. Cut back on unnecessary travel. Recycle as much as you can. Turn off the lights when no one is in the room. Turn your workstation off when you go home. If nothing else at least turn your monitor off. I know you have to leave the servers on, but do you really have to leave all those workstations running all the time? If the IT department has to update something tonight, then send an email this afternoon and let everyone know to leave their computers on tonight. How hard is that?
No matter who you are or who you work for, we can all do something to help our planet. And really, doesn’t that help us all? For more information about recycling, check out Earth911’s website.
