The energy devices and data centres use, e-waste and raw materials, how technology can help, and energy and cost calculations.
What you will learn
- Calculate energy in kWh and its cost
- Explain e-waste and the impact of manufacturing
- Suggest ways to reduce environmental harm
Energy, materials and waste
- Making devices uses energy and rare metals (cobalt, tantalum) that are often mined in harmful ways.
- Using them, and the data centres behind every stream and search, takes electricity, much of it still from fossil fuels; servers also need cooling.
- Throwing them away creates e-waste with toxic materials; only a fraction is properly recycled.
Technology can also help: smart heating and lighting, route planning, video calls instead of travel, efficient cloud data centres on renewable energy. Keeping devices longer and repairing them cuts the impact the most. Refurbishing means repairing and cleaning a used device so it can be sold or used again; recycling instead breaks it down to recover the materials.
The rest of this lesson and its 7 practice questions are locked.
In this lesson
- Energy, materials and waste
- Energy calculations
- Try it: Energy used
7 practice questions, marked as you go; about 20 minutes in all.
Key terms
Making, Using, Throwing them away, Refurbishing
In this unit: Ethical, legal and environmental impacts
Privacy, fairness, jobs and the digital divide; the Data Protection Act, Computer Misuse Act and copyright; open source and proprietary licences; the energy and e-waste behind our devices; and the questions raised by wearables, implants, self-driving cars, AI and robots, with patents, trademarks and licences.
- Ethics, privacy and culture
- Computing and the law
- Technology and the environment
- New technologies, AI and ideas
- Extended answers