It’s pretty obvious that humankind has a considerable impact on the world around it. It’s also fairly clear to anyone with observational skills that said impact isn’t always a positive one.
Ever since the development of heavy industry, we’ve been polluting our environment. At first, we didn’t really understand that we were doing anything wrong. No one really considered that the smog from industrial-era factories wasn’t exactly healthy for plants or animals, no one thought that coal power or early aerosols were all that harmful. The possibility that we could cause lasting damage to the world around us simply didn’t occur to any of us.
Of course, all that’s changed over the past few decades – there’s been a huge push towards green computing and more responsible energy use. It’s as if we’ve realized that we’ve got only one Earth, so ruining it is probably a bit of a bad idea.
It certainly helps that being energy efficient and environmentally conscientious can save money in the long run, as well. But that should be a secondary consideration. We’re making progress.
We’ve still got a long way to go, though. Computers still have a massive impact on the environment, and even the green efforts we’ve been making to mitigate things have only managed to get so far. There’s a lot that home users can do, as well – it can be as simple as shutting down your system instead of putting it in sleep mode.
That’s the topic of today’s infographic, titled “The Environmental Impact of Computing.” It’s a fairly brief one, granted, but it goes into a fair degree of depth, with a few suggestions on how the standard user might work to make things more efficient and more environmentally sound.
The infographic’s below – as always, clicking on it will display a larger version.
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