Small Businesses have a dramatic affect on the environment. A computer running for at an office, and left on during the night could cost as much as $200/year with a CRT monitor or $120/year with an LCD screen. Multiply this by the number of computers in your office and you might be surprised at the power consumption of your computer network. These are costs to you, the business owner. What are these costs to the environment?
As business owners and as citizens of earth, it is our responsibility to do our part to minimize the effects we are having on the environment. What is the solution? Solutions must be:
1. Cost Effective
2. Save You Money
3. Build Efficiency into Your Business
4. Increase Employee Satisfaction
5. Help the Environment
Computer Troubleshooters is proud to provide you with simple things that can be done. Our list includes simple changes in attitude, simple changes in daily routines and technology improvements that will enhance your business. But we also hope to save you money and improve employee satisfaction.
It comes down to using technology to REDUCE-REUSE-RECYLE.
The Bad News:
? There are 3.2 million tonnes of electronics in North American Landfills.
? Only 11% of computers are recycled.
? CRT Monitors contain lead to shield us from Radiation.
? Plastics from Electronics leach into ground water.
The Good News:
? 100% of the materials – Metals, Glass, Plastics – can be recycled from Computers
? Not for Profit organizations are taking older – working computers and shipping them worldwide through container projects – reusing computers.
? Numerous companies are accepting electronics for recycling
Technotrash Recycling Ltd. is a Vancouver based company with the mission to recover E-Waste. They are focused on developing and implementing recycling process for electronics. They make things easy for consumers and businesses to recycle electronics. They have numerous drop off locations throughout the lower mainland. They also provide pickup services to your office. You can rest easy as they will destroy all data on the hard drives and provide you with a decommission certificate. They can be reached at their website: www.technotrashrecycling.com.
In Toronto, Hi Tech Recycling Ltd. (www.hitechrecycling.com) will take away obsolete computers and monitors and ensure that they do not end up in the landfill. Hi Tech Recycling will pickup electronics and they will accept computers at their location in Downsview. They will ensure that parts will be reused or disassembled and recycled. They too will provide a certificate of decommission.
Other websites to visit:
www.computerrecyclingsociety.org
www.smileafrica.com
As business owners, it is our responsibility to lead the way. Why not have a computer recycling day at the office where employees can bring in old electronics rather than have them end up in the landfill. Computer Troubleshooters offers free computer recycling as part of the B.E.S.T. (Business Enhanced Support Technology) Managed Service Plan.
How is telecommuting going to lower your impact on the environment? This might be the easiest plan to implement and have the greatest effects. Three things will happen when you implement a telecommuting plan for your staff.
1. Less emissions into our atmosphere.
2. Happier staff – staff retention.
3. Increased Productivity.
Not every employee is a candidate for telecommuting, but many are. The first step is to have a technology solution. The easiest solution to implement is a remote desktop solution where nothing needs to be installed on the employees home PC and they run their office computer through a remote desktop connection. They have access to all files and applications as if they were at their desk in the office. With a Voice over IP solution, staff can even have their office phone in their den at home.
It is a common misconception that productivity will go down when people work from home. This is simply not true. No, not every employee can work productively from home. Many can. The business world is locked into a notion of an 8 hour day. All work must be done between 8:30 and 4:30. Productivity should not be measured by time, but by results. In many cases there are more distractions at the office than there is at home.
Step up and be a results oriented business.
And staff will be happier. By working from home 2 days per week an employee who commutes for 1 hour each way will have an extra 4 hours per week. That’s over 4 weeks extra time each year to spend with their family instead of the car stereo. There is also the cost savings for your employees. Gas, parking and maintenance adds up quickly. Telecommuting will make your staff happy.
Happier staff equals higher productivity.
Then there is the environmental impact. 30% CO2 emissions in North America come from vehicles. Hybrid cars are not the answer. Hybrid cars are a step in the right direction, but they do not eliminate emissions, they only lower them. The only way to eliminate emissions is to eliminate trips in the car.
Computer Troubleshooters use a number of products to solve the telecommuting problem. The most common program used is Remote Desktop which is built right in with Window XP and Vista. The server based solution is called Terminal Services. This allows you to run a desktop at the office from your home PC. Other solutions include LogMeIn and GoToMyPc.
Budget Airlines are making cross country travel cheaper and cheaper. However, the environmental impact is significant. Over the next 25 years the number of airline passengers will double. Before 2030 it is estimated that aircraft emissions will double.
If an alternative to flying across the country for a meeting is available, why not consider it. Video Conferencing has improved dramatically over the past few years and is a viable alternative to flights across the country. Not only will this help minimize the damage on the environment, it will save your company time and money.
Video conferencing can be done with a simple web cam, microphone and free software such as MSN. Skype is quickly becoming a leader in Internet communications both audio and video. Also leading the charge is WebEx for online meetings. The large phone companies now offer video conferencing solutions for both the audio and video portion. For higher end solutions there are a number of companies that offer video conferencing room rentals, where all the equipment is ready for you. If you need a custom designed solution, a Computer Troubleshooter near you can help.
The key ingredient for video conferencing is the quality of the internet – not just the speed/bandwidth, but more importantly the latency of the connection. Latency is simply the speed at which the information is processed. To simple way to test latency is to bring up a command prompt and type: ping www.comptroub.com and see what the “time” is. If the time is 30ms, then you have good latency.
With the speed of the internet becoming faster and faster every year, quality video conferencing is a reality.
Step Number four, Upgrading your Hardware, helps minimize power consumption. Newer equipment uses a lot less power. Remember of course to recycle the old equipment.
A CRT Monitor consumes 75 – 150 Watts
An LCD Monitor consumes 35 – 70 Watts
By upgrading all CRT monitors in your office to LCD monitors you will cut your power consumption in half. Also, newer models of printers include power save modes. Intel based CPU’s require less heating than their counterparts from AMD. This in turn means less power.
Traditional marketing through flyers and newspaper advertising is doing harm to the environment. Everyday stacks of flyers are delivered to millions of homes across the country. Most of these flyers are put straight into the garbage. These end up in the landfills. Flyers are a triple threat. The paper used means cutting down trees, the chemicals used in printing leach into ground water and the waste is filling up landfills. Fortunately flyers are now frequently printed on recycled paper and most homes now recycle flyers they receive. But flyers are still a problem.
This is where technology can help. Most people now have access to the internet and most people use the internet, and the major search engines, to find products and services in their communities. Three web based solutions to do your marketing include:
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – techniques which put your website higher on the listings
2. Pay Per Click/Adwords – use keywords, and only pay when people click through to your websites (http://adwords.google.com)
3. Online directories – use online Yellow Pages instead of advertising in the books.
Not only is web based advertising good for the environment – but it is cheaper and much, much more affective. Well planed web based advertising will save you money, and drive more customers to you.
As computer consultants we are asked all to often which is better, shut down the computer every day or leave it running. Most people are thinking about the damage or wear and tear on a computer by leaving it running. When a computer is left on, and no work is being done, the fans are running, the disk drive is spinning, so yes, leaving a computer turned on will cause some wear and tear. However, the process of shutting down, and starting up a computer is very hard on a computer, especially the power supply and hard drives. So the actually answer is – do neither. What should be done is to use the power management tools built into the computers, monitors and printers.
Did you know that a computer and monitor left on 24 x 7 could cost $10/month.
For Your Computer:
Go to Start/Control Panel
Power Options
Control Panel Icon – Power Options
Most network or laser printers also have a sleep mode which will save power. Also, most devices such as speakers can be powered through the USB port on your computer. If the computer is in stand by, then any USB devices will no longer be consuming power.
A computer that is in sleep mode will use ½ the power. A monitor that is in sleep mode has an almost negligble power consumption.
Be extremely carefull not to shut down your backup drives at night. Most backups run at night, and your data backups are worht any power consumption they require.
Other Electronics like scanners, inkjet printers, phone chargers, radios etc all use power when left plugged in. A very simple solution is to purchase a basic timer that shuts off power at 7pm to your electronics. It is common practice to use the timers to turn lights and radios on in our homes when we are out of town. Why not use these to turn power off? Timers for other power items in the office such heating and air conditioning can save on power as well.
Ribeyre & Company is an accounting and tax service company based in Port Coquitlam, BC. Started by Ted Ribeyre, Ribeyre & Company has been providing strong accounting support to their clients on an ongoing basis for over 14 years. They also specialize in accounting systems sales and support for such products as ACCPAC. When you walk into the back room at Ribeyre & Company you see rows of filing cabinets. They probably have close to 50 cabinets taking up an entire room. The ironic thing is… they are empty. In fact, they are selling the filing cabinets. Ribeyre & Company has gone paperless.
An entire report could be done just on the benefits, features and reasons to go paperless. With the cost of disk space dropping dramatically, the improvements in security and the costs of the necessary hardware coming down, the ability to go paperless is becoming a reality.
How much time is wasted every day on document related tasks; creating, filing, distributing, retrieving and destroying? Going paperless is a long process that happens over time and takes a fundamental shift in philosophy for the entire company and throughout the staff. You do not go paperless overnight, but you just start using less paper.
The first thing that a newly paperless company will notice is the cost savings in paper, printing, mailing and storing. However, over time the other benefits start to come to the forefront. The long term biggest benefit may be the access to information from anywhere. This means you can start thinking about a virtual office and telecommuting. This is where we start seeing environment saving techniques become cumulative. Going paperless means more telecommuting. More telecommuting means more sharing computers. All of these means – saving money.
But with any paperless solution, it is absolutely vital that you have a good backup solution. Computer Troubleshooters has an industry leading BDR (backup and disaster recovery) solution. Our solution includes onsite backup, offsite backup, full backup management and a disaster recovery solution.
Through virtualization, Terminal services and other new devices, we can share computers. With creative thinking around shift work and office layout, we can share computers. Gone are the days where we have to think about one computer on every desk. Ironically enough we have gone full circle. In the 80’s and even into the 90’severybody had a terminal at their desk if they needed to have a computer. These were basically windows into the mainframe that took up an entire room. The terminals were replaced with full desktops with user friendly interfaces in the early 90’s. As the price of desktops became reasonable and the software became user friendly, it became common place to put a desktop on ever computer. 15 years later we are seeing a reverse trend. We are going back to the dumb terminals – also known as thin clients.
Our goal with this report is to minimize the effects on the environment
Less computers used = less power consumed & less computers in the landfills
The reality is that no one person can possible take advantage of all the processing power that a computer has available to them. A properly maintained computer with anti-virus software, anti-spyware software, regular updates and regular maintenance will only every use 10% of available capacity for the average user.
An extremely unique solution has been designed by NComputing (www.ncomputing.com) where a up to 30 PC’s can be replaced with 1 PC and 30 access devices that use up to 99% less power and less e-waste. Combine this solution with a Terminal Services solution or a Virtual PC solution and you can quickly start seeing the money saving advantages.
Another product that is making its way into mainstream computer is Virtual Servers. Often servers are divided into multiple machines because of the tasks they must perform. However, their processing power remains largely unused. Multiple servers can be combined as virtual machines inside the operating system of a single physical server. This means less power consumed, but it also means less hardware to purchase upfront, saving the business owner money.
In Conclusion…
Nothing proposed here will help improve the environment. Our goal is to do less harm. It doesn’t take a lot of effort, just a unique way of looking at the way we do things. Traditional computing and traditional work methods are not the best way to treat our environment.
What is most interesting though is the side effects that we can have by trying to help the environment. Our goal was to do less harm to the environment but as a result, three things will happen
1. Your company will save money
2. Your business will improve
3. Tremendous social-economic benefits
What is even more interesting though is the cumulative effects these 8 steps will have. First of all it is cumulative on the benefits to the environment. But it is also very much cumulative on your business improvements and the money you will save. By going paperless you setup your office to be virtual or remote. This encourages telecommuting which may lead to the sharing of computers. By sharing computers, implementing a solution such as the one from NComputing or using a terminal server and thin clients you consume less power. Not only that but you generate less heat, in turn lowering your air conditioning costs. All of this leads to saving money on office space and supplies and leads to less electronics ending up in the landfill.
If you need any help with any of these initiatives, please call Computer Troubleshooters of Hoover at
(205) 988-9911
Go Green.
