So using sustainable in a different sense; sustainable growth, the idea that the weightless economy provides sustainable growth guaranteed has been somewhat challenged by recent events.
IT will grow. Or indeed, home working one other way in which you substitute an electronic transfer for a physical one.
Yes, I think that s a big problem, because a certain amount of computer waste is sort of shipped away, out of sight out of mind, and goes to the developing countries, where it s actually sometimes taken apart by children, scavenging some of the materials, but some of the materials in computers are toxic, so we have to be very careful about this. There s no reason they have to based in these places, they can be based in much colder places where they won t need so much air conditioning, if any, and indeed there are plans afoot to locate a whole town of these things in places like Iceland or offshore on ships. I m Hamish McRae, the Chief Economic Commentator petro chemical pumps Suppliers on The Independent, and with me are my colleagues Michael McCarthy, our Environment Editor, and Jeremy Warner, our Business Editor.
Hello, and welcome to the first of three Sustain IT Podcasts brought to you by The Independent.
Another good example of how electricity might be saved, one of the biggest grey areas at the moment is so called Internet hotels, these vast great warehouses that house the servers that make the Internet work, and at the moment they tend to be based close to the centres of IT excellence in California or India or wherever, in relatively hot places, and they require huge amounts of power for air conditioning.
That was a download from The Independent, in association with BT..
So no quick fixes, but actually an area which is hugely important, and something that we re very pleased at The Independent to have this opportunity of writing more about. I had a friend as a boy whose father owned a factory on the upper reaches of the River Erwell in Lancashire and the River Erwell went into his father s factory as a tumbling stream, crystal clear, and it came out orange on the other side. I don t think networking saves the environment, but it is one of the tools we ve got to help us use properly.
I agree with that.
It s happening already, simple things like re organising the trucking of supermarkets, so that people delivering the stuff to the markets don t have to make so many calls, and move it with light traffic rather than heavy traffic. Another for example, is the e waste or electronic waste that we have, which is now maybe fifty thousand tonnes a year of computer hardware, which is just thrown away by people in the west.