I stumbled onto a Website called “Abandoned But Not Forgotten” today and found what the site claims are photos of a 30-year old Sun Microsystems Data center. Can anybody confirm or identify this data center’s location? Also, what happened with all of that equipment that’s still lying around in there? It doesn’t seem responsible to leave this stuff for the next building’s tenants or allow access to people that are in there shooting shotguns  and painting 4:20 on the walls.

Just in case you missed it, green computing is all the rage in the data center lately. Most of the attention has to do with energy efficiency in the form of more efficient processors, cooling systems and overall data center infrastructure. One aspect that isn’t as sexy as designing an ultra fast chip that uses half the power is e-waste. In fact the, electronics power efficiency coalition of big name vendors, The Green Grid consortium, was recently dumped on by Gartner Inc. for not including e-waste into their platform of green computing initiatives.

But what is e-waste and why should we care? To answer that question, we’ve reposted a Q&A with environmental reporter Elizabeth Grossman from our old blog.

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SearchDataCenter.com reporter Mark Fontecchio interviewed, Elizabeth Grossman, an Oregon-based author who stumbled upon e-waste in her home town. In her experience as environmental reporter, Grossman started researching pollution on a local river for an environmental group and discovered that e-waste was a big culprit. She set out on a multiyear journey to figure out what was going on with e-waste. Her result was the book High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, which was released earlier this year from Island Press.SearchDataCenter.com caught up with Grossman to ask her a few questions about how her book came to be and the growing issue of e-waste.

Could you explain how you got involved in writing this book?Elizabeth Grossman: I got interested in this because I was doing some research on pollution in the Willamette River, which flows through Portland, Oregon. What I discovered was that the high tech industry was actually contributing the majority of this pollution. I had not spent any time thinking about high tech at all, I was just completely astonished by this, so I decided I would start poking around and figure out what was going on.How did you conduct the research?Grossman: I wanted to look at the scale of the whole life of the manufacturing process. It has to be a worldwide story because it’s a global industry. Even if a company is U.S. in origin, has its corporate headquarters in the U.S., there are manufacturing facilities for products all over the world, and they sell into the international market. I did look at things internationally because you have to because this is a global business. A lot of the impetus behind current environmental regulations is coming from Europe and influencing all the companies.

How are regulations like WEEE and ROHS in Europe affecting manufacturers in the U.S.?

Grossman: Most companies are complying with these international directives. It doesn’t make financial sense to make a product that you can sell in Copenhagen but can’t sell in New York.

What’s the U.S. doing about e-waste?

Grossman: Right now we have no national legislation governing how high tech electronic components are produced or disposed of. In this country, local governments are responsible for solid waste. There have been dozens of pieces of state legislation governing e-waste, but only a half dozen of them are truly substantive and involve banning things with display screens or, as in the case of Washington and Maine and also Maryland, require producers to be involved in some of the product takeback.

Were the vendors willing to talk to you about e-waste?

Grossman: I was pretty naïve about how forthcoming manufacturers would be. It’s just a competitive industry, so proprietary. One of my disappointments was how I wasn’t able to go on site and see what was going on. In the end I was able to talk to everyone I wanted to, but it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.

How good are the vendor takeback programs?

Grossman: They’re all fully engaged in making these environmental improvements. All have takeback programs. They’re very controlled about the information they’re willing to share.

What do you think about the federal government’s response so far?

Grossman: I think they’ve been extremely slow to act and not anywhere near as aggressive to coming to grips about the exporting of e-waste to developing countries. The attitude is hoping that industry will help solve the problem. I think there is so much stuff that could slip through the cracks that anything that is entirely voluntary probably won’t work.

Dell launched a long-term plan this week to become the greenest technology company on Earth, asking customers for ideas on green computing and requiring suppliers to report green house gas emmissions.

The new Zero Carbon Initiative requires Dell to maximize the energy efficiency of its products to offset carbon impact over time. The initiative includes the efforts of Dell, its employees and its suppliers and will reflect the direct feedback of its customers.

The company also committed to reduce the carbon intensity of its global operations by 15% by 2012 and extended its “Plant a Tree for Me” program to Europe, allowing computer users to offset the emissions associated with the electricity their computers use.

Dell is asking customers for their ideas in building the “greenest PC on the planet.” Dell’s call for ideas and more information is on its IdeaStorm site.

The zero-carbon initiative will include IT lifecycle assessments, management of Dell’s direct and indirect climate impacts, reduction of the company’s carbon intensity and partnership with customers.

Dell will undertake a lifecycle assessment of the carbon impact of an IT product through its supply chain and with input from environmental stakeholders, the company reports.

Dell has requested that its primary suppliers begin reporting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data. Suppliers risk having their overall scores reduced during Dell quarterly business reviews for not identifying and publicly reporting GHG emissions. A supplier’s volume of Dell business can be affected by the scores earned on reviews. Dell will work with suppliers on emissions reduction strategies once data is collected.

Dell’s strategy is to deliver products that provide the maximum performance at the least amount of power required. Some products use Energy Smart configurations across server, desktop and notebook lines and meet the latest Energy Star 4.0 requirements. Dell is also advising customers on data center design to help reduce power requirements.

Dell Operations

Dell recently completed a power-management pilot on more than 50,000 computers on the company’s internal network. The pilot resulted in the savings of about 13 million kilowatt hours of electricity, equivalent to avoidance of 8,500 tons of CO₂ and savings of $1.8 million annually. Dell plans to identify ways to help its corporate customers achieve similar energy savings.

The company also proposes that the effectiveness of corporate climate policies be contrasted by a carbon-intensity measurement comparing the CO₂ equivalent of total reported GHG emissions to annual revenue. By this carbon-intensity measurement, Dell reports that its own GHG impact is among the lowest of those companies listed on the Fortune 50^. The company also pledged to maintain leadership by reducing its own carbon intensity 15% by 2012.

Recycling

Dell offers consumers worldwide free recycling of used Dell equipment as well as free recycling of other branded equipment with purchase of new Dell equipment.

Glad to see Dell and other big players in the IT space are taking environmental responibilities seriously. I suppose time will tell if these GHG reduction goals are realistic and attainable. Here’s to hoping…

A new server packaging option called Multipack introduced today by Dell can save customers time and aggravation by eliminating up to half of the packaging materials and waste resulting during a typical customer installation of IT equipment.  The company estimates server deployment times can be greatly reduced by cutting down on its packaging, so customers can get their servers out of the packaging and up and running quickly.

Even better, the the potential savings of paper and cardboard will be equivalent to about 52,000 trees per year once the program is available worldwide, Dell reports.

Multipack is now available as a packaging option, at no additional cost, for U.S. customers ordering more than one of Dell’s PowerEdge 1950, PowerEdge 860, PowerEdge SC1435 or PowerEdge 1955 servers. 

Through the program, which will be made available worldwide, up to four 1U rack height servers or 10 blade servers can be delivered in a single box. In addition to reducing cardboard packaging, when only a single set of product manuals and CDs is included in each box, collateral materials can be reduced by up to 75%, further reducing paper use and material waste. Dell estimates the following annual savings:

• 2,000 tons of cardboard
• 1,000 tons of wood pallets
• 300 tons of paper
• 80 tons of polyethylene foam
• 40 tons of plastic

Whether users are integrating a few units or clustering hundreds of systems, when you receive each component in individually packed boxes, the amount of total accumulated waste in boxes, packaging and documentation can be significant, according to Tommy Minyard, assistant director for the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the
University of Texas at Austin. 

Dell plans to make Multipack available across additional product lines in the future.Also, Dell’s marketing publications now use an average of 50 percent recycled content paper — and many publications use up to 90 percent, the company reports.

This warms the heart. Big boys like Dell planting trees and cutting down on excessive packaging. Lets hope other vendors and businesses follow their lead.  

Researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia have, with the help of the good people at Fosters, have successfully used brewing waste to generate electrical power, according to The Register. The small scale “microbial fuel cell” prototype has apparently been operating for a few months and there are plans to build a larger system that scientists predict will be able to generate up to 2KW.

Though this is not a real significant amount of energy considering the size of the facility would require over 600 gallons of material, but it does illustrate that there are multiple energy sources to consider and explore . . . and if some of those options involve brewing beer, well, I guess we’ll just have to live with it.

David Douglas, the VP of eco-responsibility over at Sun Microsystems, has a good post on his blog about the cradle-to-grave environmental cost of a server. Douglas reveals that Sun is starting to look at the production of its servers in terms of the amount of energy it takes to produce, use, and recycle the equipment:

I suspect that this will end up being one of the big differences between today’s product engineers and those fifty years from now. Between laws and social responsibility expectations, future engineers will be required to do a complete accounting for their products at design time.

It will be interesting to see if regulations like WEEE and RoHS are just the beginning of things to come. Meanwhile, I wonder if Sun assessed how much energy, both in marketing and automobile fuel, it would spend on its Blackbox tour, which Douglas is heading.

Computerworld has a story on an e-waste bill that Mike Thompson, D-Calif., is proposing in the U.S. House. As the story says, the legislation on electronic waste is recycled:

The bill, called the National Computer Recycling Act, was first introduced several years (ago) but wasn’t adopted then. This time, Thompson’s bill may not end up in the recycle bin.

Don’t hold your breath. Back in July, SearchDataCenter.com did a story on e-waste. At the time, the older bill from Thompson was H.R. 425 and had been sitting in a House subcommittee since February 2005, doing nothing.

Now that the new Congress started, Thompson reintroduced the bill in January as H.R. 233. The two bills (H.R. 425 and H.R. 233) are identical but for one fact: the older, now-defunct version had 28 House members co-sponsoring the bill. The new one: none.

As H.R. 425 showed, it’s a long journey from a bill being proposed to it becoming the law of the land.