Impact and mitigation of computing resources

Manufacture of IT equipment has a significant environmental impact.

Strategies to help reduce this: 

• Consider repairability index of equipment to be purchased 
• Consider slight over- specing of machine to prolong whole life – how to calculate this? 
• Strive to re-use /repurpose equipment or donate for re-use rather than recycle (but also consider impact of prolonging use of low efficiency devices)  

Resource utilisation  

Physical Materials 

What will the utilisation pattern of the particular resource over its expected lifetime be and does that warrant a physical piece or equipment (rather than a virtual component either from Computer Science (currently on premis) or cloud based)? 

Energy 

In terms of energy consumption and energy recovery, centralised resources are more efficient. 

Produce set of scenarios and score in terms of embodied energy, earth resources, energy consumption and carbon footprint of energy (is UCL 100% renewable, what about Azure and AWS?) 

eWaste 

It's not actually waste, just expensive* to break down into recyclable (or reusable) components. Investigate if there is more we could do to preserve materials value in a higher state? Engage with https://ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/  

Set up “Dismantle circles”, like knitting circles but instead of knitting we take stuff apart and chat about how things are made, repaired and designed.   

* But what’s the real cost? It's actually to our environment if we don’t make use of the material, either in new resources being mined, energy of production or pollution from recycling.

Also look for novel ways of re-use e.g. magnets from HDDs