To upgrade or to replace?

It's often greener and cheaper to upgrade computer components than to buy a whole new system, but even then, not all things are what they seem

"Do I have a problem or do I have an opportunity?" asks Bram.

"Here in the frozen north we call Canada," he explains, "it is 11 below. I leave my computers running, partially heating my house with energy that is derived about 50 percent from hydroelectric and nuclear. I figure that is better than heating the whole house with $5-per-gallon heating oil. Also, if I turned them off, they might not start again, requiring me to buy replacement computers, each at a considerable environmental cost of manufacturing. And I ride a bicycle in the summer -- although I'm sure there's a lot of energy used in the construction of a bicycle.

"Indeed," says Bram, "nothing is simple."

Taking a look at the entire cost -- not just the dollar price -- of the computers we use can throw a little more light on purchase decisions.

[ The Gripe Line reports on another conservation effort in "Turning green into green" | Keep current on green tech tips, strategies, and innovations to save both datacenter dollars and the planet. Subscribe to InfoWorld's Green Tech newsletter. ]

This is one reason, according to Jim Lynch, director of the Computer Recycling & Reuse and GreenTech Program at TechSoup, who wrote to me on the same subject, that TechSoup's partner, Redemtech, likes "redeployment." "Redeployment is not talked about much," says Lynch, "but it is probably one of the highest-impact things companies can do to wring value out of IT assets." Redeployment is simply the systematic refurbishing and reusing of assets rather than recycling and replacing them.

Lynch cites a book by Dr. Eric Williams and Ruediger Kuehr, "Computers and the Environment, Understanding and Managing Their Impacts," which finds that "producing the average 53-pound desktop computer and CRT monitor requires 530 pounds of fossil fuels, 50 pounds of chemicals, and 3,330 pounds of water. In fact, 75 percent of PC energy consumption has already happened before a new computer is ever switched on. Adding additional life to computers saves 5 to 20 times more energy than recycling over the computer's life cycle. It's much better for the environment to extend the life of a computer for extra two or three years than to buy a new one every three to four years."