Purchasing and Negotiation Training

Robert Menard, Certified Purchasing Professional, Certified Professional Purchasing Consultant

At first blush, the answer is obvious, isn’t it?  Well, let’s define the parameters, then we can jump to a conclusion.  Print media includes letters, brochures, catalogs, and virtually every other piece of printed media in which business engages.  Digital media includes the very same material but in electronic form.  

Now we can jump to the conclusion that digital media is way more Sustainable, right –  no paper, no ink, no printing?  However, in conducting extensive research for my latest book in early 2010, Green Purchasing and Sustainability, I learned that virtually every Sustainability argument is not fully settled; indeed, many controversies may not even be clearly defined.  Print versus digital media is but one of those controversies.  

It often comes down to how it is marketed, a truism in all business.  Let’s use the example of electric cars, a hotly disputed Sustainability argument.  Are they greener?  Well, that contention loses its luster when confronted with the fact that these vehicles must be fueled by electricity, the least BTU intensive of all fuels .  What is worse, the electricity fuel is generated in enormous part by power plants that burn fossil fuels, primarily coal.  Add to this calculus the fact that most of the batteries for eclectic cars are manufactured in non eco-friendly countries,  to say little of the replacement and disposal of these heavy metal, environmentally dangerous batteries and the Sustainability claim flips from good to bad.  A similar controversy dogs the print versus electronic media argument. 

The toxicity of computer hardware in production and end of life is a Sustainability issue. Copper, chromium, cadmium, nickel, mercury, and lead, among other metals are essential to computer hardware.  Recovery and the potential for contamination are one issue in the debate.  Another is energy consumption.

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In an EPA  report issued July 2007 in conjunction with its Energy Star program for conservation and efficiency in the electronic world, the EPA reported: “Under current efficiency trends, national energy consumption by servers and data centers could nearly double again in another five years (i.e., by 2011) to more than 100 billion kWh representing a $7.4 billion annual electricity cost.”

 The peak load on the grid from these servers and data centers is estimated to be 7 gigawatts (GW), equivalent to the output of about 15 power plants. The report added that total electricity consumed by servers in U.S. data centers, including requisite cooling, consumed 1.5 percent of the nation’s entire electricity in 2006. An effort is underway to create an Energy Star certification for data centers.

 Data Center Dilemma 

As data centers continue to grow in number and importance, greater efficiencies in IT to conserve energy, while finding more sustainable power sources to meet the nation’s total electricity demand become more important. McKinsey & Co.  reports that data centers worldwide generate roughly half of that of the airline industry – with CO₂ emissions from data centers expected to grow from 80 megatons in 2007 to 340 megatons in 2020.  In an announcement just this week, Facebook  unveiled construction of  its new $450 million data center in North Carolina, the latest in a string of similar projects in that state by companies including Apple, Google, and American Express.

 Email Spam & GHG

In a McAfee  sponsored study conducted by ICF, International , the climate-change effects of email spam were considered – which helps to shed light on legitimate email messaging. Among the findings:

• The average email spam causes emissions equivalent to 0.3 grams of carbon dioxide per message
• In 2008, there were 62 trillion such messages
• All together, all these email messages caused the CO₂ equivalent of driving a car around the Earth 1.6 million times
• Nearly 80 percent of energy consumed associated with spam comes from end users and their computers and mobile devices

 Spam filtering accounts for 16 percent of spam-related energy use – and if everyone and every organization employed spam filtering, the total energy used to deal with spam would be reduced by 75 percent per year.

 According to Institute for Sustainable Communication  article, “Which Medium is More Sustainable? Paper or Digital?” , “Over the next few years it can be expected that lifecycle data and the carbon labeling of all products will move from the margins to the mainstream. In part this will be due to the high priority that the current administration in Washington has placed on carbon cap and trade legislation, and regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, there is already broad support for voluntary initiatives such as the Carbon Disclosure Project and Carbon Trust labeling initiative.”

They go on to state in another story that the “pixel vs. paper” controversy is heating up as data centers propagate.  They cite the contention of Dr. Joe Webb,  ‘We have a coal-fired Internet.’ Meaning, we should not forget that all those who tout paperless billing via a the Internet or downloading e-books to their Amazon Kindle reader via the Internet are still using one of millions of computer nodes on a worldwide network which is run off of electricity and which by definition leaves a carbon imprint of a considerably sulfurous sort… ”

Another contention is that for every 2 Megabytes of data moving on the Internet, the energy from a pound of coal is needed to create the necessary kilowatt-hours.

So what do you think?