I just got a PDF. Read it and was about to archive it on my PC when I wondered... is that better in enviROI terms than printing it out?
It was 1.5M. Not huge in the great scheme of things (well, these days), but 99 more and I have a Gig. 99 more of those and I have my hard drive. And when that's full, I need a new one, plus backup.
Is that one sheet of A4 (Viking recycled) I have printed out really so bad?
Note: Prof's Posers appear on the site and also in Junkk.com newsletters. We've had a few interesting bits of feedback. See what this one may bring.
2 comments:
You can get a lot more than you reckon on your hard drive.
A Gigabyte is actually 1000 Megabytes (and 1 MByte equals 1,024 KBytes), so you could actually get 680+ documents of a similar size in 1 Gig. In an 80 Gig hard drive you could therefore theoretically get more than 54,000 such documents.
It is, however, an interesting question to put on Prof's Posers. The paper can, of course, be recycled again; but in a way, so can the space on your hard drive; once you decide you no longer need it, it gets deleted and the space if free for you to store some other data in.
It would take some pretty heavy duty calculation to work out the actual energy consumption of the hard drive in addressing and retrieving the document. Not something that I'm going to volunteer for!!
I love the smell of brainpower in the mind-afternoon.
So dubious maths gratefully corrected.
I will always need stuff like this. I am a man. And I created Junkk.com. So be it bytes or paper, it will be retained.
I was not thinking so much of the operational consequences of the drive; more the making it and getting it to me.
All adds up!
And I think I have another Prof's Poser coming that asks if carbon offsetting by planting a tree is a good thing, surely by using paper from managed forests we are actually doing more good than recycling or even cutting back on usage!
In fact, by this logic, I offset with each page I print!
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