Sustainability and IT – My magnum opus at RIT
February 15th, 2010 | by emontero |Scott Hawker, former adviser and head of my capstone project’s committee at RIT, emailed my publication-ready monograph not long ago:
Here’s the abstract:
Information technology holds tremendous potential to help consumers and firms make more sustainable choices by providing information at key decision points. As one example, there are a number of software programs that help calculate and summarize environmental metrics for various products and processes. Surprisingly, while many printers are moving into the IT arena, the technology has not been fully utilized. For the most part, there is a lack of knowledge on the part of the consumer on the sustainability impacts of their communication decisions. Thus, this paper outlines a decision tool, presented to the consumer as they make a print decision, which estimates the energy consumption of printing a given document by analyzing the user’s requirements for the print job, the printer selected and the corresponding life-cycle criteria for these elements.
If you’d like to read more, here’s the link to the paper in PDF format. I’ll be uploading the other major component of this work (i.e. Java code) in the near future.
3 Responses to “Sustainability and IT – My magnum opus at RIT”
By xmonk on Feb 26, 2010 | Reply
Had some free time, and decided to read your paper, found it quite interesting.
What is proposed is a huge undertaking, and truly hope a good solution can be found.
Congrats.
By emontero on Feb 27, 2010 | Reply
@xmonk,
Thanks! It was quite a ride and an amazing learning experience. One of the most important takeaways was to realize most of our so-called “green choices” are really not so green after all. People usually neglect life-cycle costs. How can we be truly sure if we disregard all the implications our choices have?
For instance, let’s say I buy a Prius because I’m tired of driving the Earth-destroying SUV I bought a couple of years ago. Would the Prius really be a smarter choice in the long run? Yes, the Prius will consume less fuel, but will the end-of-life cost of disposing a Prius, with its especial batteries and all its materials, be really cheaper than the traditional, big and old SUV? When I say cheaper, I’m not talking about money. I’m talking about the impact on the environment. There aren’t any studies showing which car would be actually “greener” throughout an entire life cycle (i.e. manufacturing, acquisition, use, upkeep, and disposal). No empirical data. We tend to make uninformed decisions like this all the time. With better software and computational models, we’d be able to distill our reasoning and confirm or refute our choices.
So there’s indeed a lot of potential here. I’m hoping I’ll get to explore this area further down the road.
By xmonk on Feb 27, 2010 | Reply
Yes, you’re completely right, and I assume due to the nature of batteries, the Prius might prove to be a lot more expensive on it’s end of life.
Though there has been some head way on developing new energy sources (batteries) that are less harmful in the disposal phase.
One thing that worries me, is the human aspect, we always pick convenience, take the case of printing in a office, a user writing a proposal, would print drafts after drafts for correction, because it seems easier, while wasting paper, and energy, just because of a perceived convenience, modern printers have a draft mode (i think that’s how it’s called) that prints at lesser quality, saving ink, and supposedly energy, but still a huge amount of paper is wasted. Taking the human out of the equation might help, but how to achieve that is another problem that needs solving.