Why is computers bad for the environment

In developing countries children and adults gain disease due to the existence of electronic waste which causes skin cancer, lung cancer, brain damage, kidney disease and abortion. Computers also cause unnecessary waste of paper by printing files and emails, most office waste is made out of paper. People who use computers never turn the actual device off which wastes a large amount of electricity that could have been potentially saved and reduce the amount of electricity produced by burning fossil fuels.

Computers have a negative impact on the health of its user such as the following diseases: arthritis, sleeping disorders such as frequently waking up during the night or having insomnia, back pain for staying in the same sitting position, headaches and poor attention spam in which you regard single tasks as boring and makes you anxious.

Watching the screen of the computer that contains lights can burn your retina and cause blindness. Constant use of computers can mess with your mentally and dissolve you from your personal and social life, it will simply become an addiction and cause behavioural problems in which you choose computers to resolve your personal stress and problems in life.

These include:. In the UK, the average lifespan of an electronic device is two years. It is often easier to buy a new device and discard the old one than to maintain or upgrade an old device. If the item isn't recycled or resold, it will end up in a landfill site. Sometimes electrical items are sent to countries which have less strict laws about recycling. The same issues face data centers.

Today, data centers, some of which span many millions of square feet, account for 1 percent of global energy consumption, a number that is expected to grow. As cloud computing continues to grow, decisions about where to run applications -- on a device or in a data center -- are being made based on performance and battery life, not carbon footprint. Adding environmental impact to the parameters of computational design requires a massive cultural shift in every level of the field, from undergraduate CS students to CEOs.

To that end, Brooks has partnered with Embedded EthiCS, a Harvard program that embeds philosophers directly into computer science courses to teach students how to think through the ethical and social implications of their work. The researchers also hope to partner with faculty from Environmental Science and Engineering at SEAS and the Harvard University Center for the Environment to explore how to enact change at the policy level.

We need this to be a primary objective in the development of computing overall," said Wei. Materials provided by Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Original written by Leah Burrows. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Science News. ScienceDaily, 2 March