July 2008 Archives

There have been a lot of articles lately about green buildings and homes. So when I find out about the ones located in 'office parks' and low-density subdivisions on what had just been open space i.e. 'greenfield development' I just shake my head.

A 'green' building surrounded by a huge car-packed parking lot and a 'green house' on a cul-de-sac with a couple of SUVs in the driveway are the environmental equivalent of the fitness fanatic who jogs to the store to buy a pack of cigarettes.

For no matter how energy efficient these structures are the gains don't fully compensate for the environmental losses caused by (a) perpetuating transportation patterns that favor the private automobile, which consumes more resources and emits more pollutants both directly and indirectly than any other mode and (b) the loss of oxygen-generation, water supply, erosion control, food production capacity and other life-giving benefits when land is paved over.

That's why I placed single quotes around 'office parks' because their environmental consequences contradict what real parks should be about and that is rejuvenating one's own health rather than painting a pretty picture, like the billboards that hide the destruction in the film Brazil. 

Both 'office parks' and their residential counterparts by their location and low-density design make transportation access by means other than the private automobile impractical and expensive to provide. While main line transit routes serving downtowns and high-density residential and commercial hubs do well financially, those that serve sprawling office and residential developments incur high operating costs and low demand, and are often the first to be cut during budget crunches.

The Victoria Transport Policy Institute (VTPI) based in Victoria, BC, Canada, is a leading authority on the direct and indirect costs of transportation, including land use. I've worked with VTPI's executive director Todd Litman and he knows his stuff.

For example the VTPI compared the land consumed by sprawl and compact development. For an office with 1,000 square feet and needing four parking spots, if it is sited in an 'office park' it would have an environmental footprint of 2,640 square feet while if it is placed in a three-story urban location with 1 on-street parking space it would leave a mark of just 580 square feet. 

Similarly for a home with 1,250 square feet, one located in a sprawl development would have an environmental footprint of 2,580 square feet while one located in a compact urban area would consume just 1,040 square feet. http://www.vtpi.org/landuse.pdf

This last point illustrates one of the potential environmental downside of teleworking. Its benefit of reducing commuting, and emissions could be degraded if the teleworker decides to buy a larger home, like on a subdivision that once had been a field, and which removes public transit, cycling, or walking for non-commute trips.

To illustrate the total environmental impacts of sprawl especially transportation, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (Canada's better-heeled equivalent of Fannie Mae) and the Natural Resources Canada, a federal government department, published a report that shows that a family living in a low-density suburban type home in the outer suburbs emits 11,800 kilograms of CO2 annually. Instead if they lived in a medium-density inner suburban compact development they would emit just 6,100 kg, largely because public transit is more readily available. ftp://ftp.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/chic-ccdh/Research_Reports-Rapports_de_recherche/eng_bilingual/Green%20Gas%20EmissionsEN_FINAL.pdf

Therefore, if you truly want to go green in your office and home/home offices you need to:

* Select locations and buildings for offices and homes on long-existing already-serviced land including brownfields (i.e. recycle, reuse, renew), in mid-to higher-density areas, well served by transit, and with cycling and walking access. The one exception are new walkable transit-oriented developments at rail and bus stations and at ferry terminals;

* Develop and implement strategies to encourage driving alternatives i.e. no free parking, subsidized transit passes, bike rakes, and devising and expanding telework programs;

* When choosing homes for home offices maximize your existing space like basements, garages, and spare bedrooms or if not possible build a loft or an extension.

--BBR

The smartest computing solution environment-wise for organizations is to go dumb, as in dumb terminals.  

Richard 'Zippy' Grigonis, executive editor, Internet Telephony reports that network computing either with purpose-built thin-client systems or even 'lobotomized' PCs connected to a network server use less power than 'intelligent' PCs. 

Let's look at the numbers. Assuming flat panel LCD monitors (FPMs) at each workstation, and 300 watts (W) for a router, hubs, and firewall appliances for all scenarios: 

'Smart System' --120W for typical PC  

'Dumb' Systems: --100W for dumb PC 

Or --43.5W (40W alone for the FPMs) for fanless thin-client dumb terminals 

Plus 1000 W for fat server, off two load-sharing power supplies, to support dumb PCs and terminals 

Based on this it only takes 9 to 10 dumb units: thin-clients or dumb PCs connected to a fat server to equal the power consumption of 11 smart PCs. Beyond that you are 'green computing'. 

There are also other advantages of going dumb. These are lower IT support costs and improved security because employees cannot knowingly or unknowingly load sniffer software or 'bot' the system or download and walk off with data. Theft risk is less because who wants a computer that is 'stupid'? 

There are thin-client computers such as by , but by no means exclusive to Devon IT, Netvoyager, and Sun:  

http://www.devonit.com/thin_client_computing/thin_clients_101.php 
http://www.netvoyager.co.uk/ 
http://www.sun.com/sunray/sunray2/ 
 

Dumb computing is also for telecommuting workers, especially home agents. It lessens the cost, complex, and security issues with supporting them. There are now commercial thin client boxes like the eeePC by Asus that needs only an Ethernet connection 

http://eeepc.asus.com/global/product.htm 

What your ROI is for switching from smart to dumb will depend on total costs, installation or equipment rebuild, and energy, IT savings, and monetized security benefits. There is not only direct energy savings from the hardware but also from reduced cooling demand: PCs produce heat, and it is ventilation and cooling rather than heating that draws the most power. 

The 'green' benefits are fewer greenhouse gas emissions and/or other environmental consequences such as e.g. land for hydro dams and generating stations, and for unsightly transmission and distribution equipment. 

The actual environmental savings will depend on where your energy supplier gets their electricity. Solar and wind are the cleanest followed by hydro, biofuels, and natural gas, though hydro has its environmental consequences i.e. destruction of open, oxygen-generating space for reservoirs. 

Oil-fired generators, especially those that get their supplies from tar sands whose production process is an ecological nightmare, and coal, especially that extracted by blowing up mountaintops, are down the list. They are especially reliant on scrubbers to remove sulfur dioxide, but in doing so produce CO2. 

For the eco-conscious are companies that sell green power to businesses and consumers. One example is Bullfrog Power. http://www.bullfrogpower.com
 
Thin-client computing may also lead to less e-waste because the units are smaller, with less toxic substances used in their construction (see the past post on this topic) and may less last longer because their principal obsolescence-prone component is the software. 

That 'small-is-beautiful' approach may make smart PCs the equivalent of SUVs. And that, according to the New York Times makes the PC vendors worried; they, like the automakers, rely on the big profits from the hulking but inefficient models. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/technology/21pc.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=business 

Will big "smart" PCs join the SUVs and the other dinosaurs? --BBR

The greenest, fastest, and safest commute, one that requires the lowest investment from your pocket and from your tax dollars (compared with mass transit and HOV lanes) is from wherever you are in your home to your home office. The same goes for your employees.

Facet/Teletrips reports that each person teleworked or telecommuted just 1 to 2 days per week then each year they would save 100 - 200 gallons of fuel and 1.5 to 5 metric tonnes of CO2 / employee / year (equates to 7.5 percent -25 percent of an individual's annual carbon footprint). 

Teleworking is like giving your staff a pay raise and a cut in hours for free. Facet/Teletrips reports that it saves them each $2,000 - $10,000 in after tax dollars and frees up 160 hours of their time from commuting every year.

Your organization also benefits from teleworking as it can gain $2,000 - $10,000 real estate and other cost savings / employee / year, and greater staff retention and recruiting. 

https://www.teletrips.com/public/learn.php

The rising gas prices are already reportedly making organizations think about teleworking. Employees, especially lower-paid ones like contact center agents are less willing to travel the same distances to work because they have to pay more out of their pockets.

Telework is also a proven disaster response strategy by distributing the workforce that makes operations less vulnerable to threats and 'events'. Telework ties into the Internet, which was conceived of and created by the US government to withstand and respond to an enemy attack by distributing computers over a network. 

And on 9-11-01 both telework and the Internet delivered. I wrote and answered the 'Are You OK' e-mails from a friend's house in New Jersey that I ended up after evacuating my old Manhattan office with my laptop--after witnessing the attacks that had knocked out conventional communications systems. My son, a paramedic, was at Ground Zero but neither my wife nor I knew if he was dead or alive for nearly 2 days because we could not reach him.

If you have a contact center and want to learn more about teleworking then I invite you to register and take part in a great Webinar on this topic that is taking place Wedneday July 16 at 2pm ET, sponsored by VoltDelta and Transera. Your questions are very welcome and will help us increase our understanding about this timely topic.

http://www.tmcnet.com/webinar/volt-delta2/volt-delta-webinar-agent-at-home-solutions-revolutionary-change-for-the-contact-center.htm



 

Today is garbage and recycling day in my neighborhood. As I sort out the plastics, paper, and metals from the blue bin under our kitchen sink I am reminded why producer/seller-pay e-waste recycling programs like that just announced by the Province of Ontario http://www.ene.gov.on.ca/en/news/2008/071001.php can and will work: by assigning costs to waste. 

My community charges for trash pickup. You have to buy garbage tickets. The way to minimize the number of tickets you need to purchase is by recycling. Which is why I had my head under the kitchen sink this morning.

E-waste is a lot nastier than what I was rummaging through (I won't get into the subject of my other trash, which includes the so-far literally insoluble problem of handling cat litter). The hardware that we rely on relies on metals and plastics that are extremely toxic, such as cadmium, lead, chromium, PVCs, and polybrominated biphenyls, when released into the environment i.e. don't drink, breathe, or eat something that has been exposed to this stuff. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources (hmm. does 'DNR' mean the environment? Never mind...) has a great set of pages on this topic http://www.iowadnr.gov/waste/recycling/ewaste.html

By assigning costs to disposing e-waste hopefully the manufacturers and resellers will be prompted further to find ways to 'green-gineer' their products to reduce the amount of this garbage that could well end up in our bodies (making these goods also spews out toxins). At the same time, by making these items more expensive the buyers i.e. you and I will think twice about throwing them out and instead repair or find new uses for them. 

I'd like to see some entrepreneur buy discarded PCs and CRTs, strip them out and turn them into dumb thin-client terminals and web appliances, to be sold at the fraction of the cost of computers. Just like the smart people who thought of recycling inkjet cartridges. 

Rebuilding these units locally/regionally also reduces the enormous amount of greenhouse gas and other emissions incurred in shipping new computers such as from Asia. The hulking diesel-burning container ships are a major pollution source in port cities like Seattle and Vancouver, BC as the prevailing winds spread and dump the gases and particulates on homes and businesses.

The market is there. Most corporate functions such as contact centers do not require their individual users to make sufficient amounts of computations to demand processing capabilities at their desktops. Many residents just use their computers to websurf and send e-mail and SMS. So why buy all this toxin-larded hardware that also consumes a lot of power, thereby releasing more pollutants, when it isn't needed for the tasks at hand?

Applying costs to waste, and rewards for efficiency is the best way to get all of us to go green.

The carbon tax brought in by the Canadian province of British Columbia that came into effect on Canada Day, July 1, and which is being advocated at the federal level by the Liberal Party of Canada led by former environment minister Stephane Dion, recognizes if you want people, and organizations, to curb their pollution then they should pay for polluting. If they, and we, want to pay less then they, and we can pollute less. It's that simple. 

The hard fact is that pollution costs all of us. The environment is not a "free lunch".

For example, a study by the Ontario Medical Association, The Illness Cost of Air Pollution, estimates that in the province of Ontario in 2005 "overall economic losses associated with air pollution exposure are expected to be in the order of $7.8 billion. This total is expected to increase to over $12.9 billion by 2026."

Such losses are borne by all taxpayers. By shifting the cost burdens to those who create them at the sources will reduce taxes, healthcare costs, and increase productivity. 

Carbon taxes help place the burden of responsibility for the environment on where it should lie, on each one of us.  It gives us clear choices: pay more or use and/or encourage employees to use mass transit, initiate a telework program, use conferencing rather than travel to meetings, retrofit a building to curb energy demand. It is up to us to make the right decisions.

Carbon taxes should not be tax grabs. Instead the money should go to strategies to lower emissions, such as investments in mass transit, developing alternative energy sources and promoting conservation, in encouraging and incentivizing telecommuting programs, and to enable residents and organizations to make purchases that will cut pollution. 

Both the British Columbia program and the federal Liberal proposals provide either for tax credits or reductions that give money back to help make the changes. 

The province is also investing heavily in mass transit in the Metro Vancouver area, smaller cities, and in rural areas. While more can be done, and some of its highway expansion plans are a little shaky environment-wise (there are many studies that show that new highway capacity fills up in a few years because it encourages pollution-spawning sprawl), the province's plan is one of the most dynamic and gutsy approaches ever made by any North American government on this issue. It is matched only the no-freeways stance in Portland, Oregon in the 1970s that initiated that city's mass transit and carbon-minimizing smart growth renaissance.

With alternatives to emitting large amounts of carbon in place, there should be no reason to pay large amounts of tax. That's a win-win for all of us.