Surprise! Digital Downloads Have Bigger Carbon Footprint Than Most Discs

[medv4380]

I can't agree with the study because it sets the upper bound electrical usages for a single Gigabyte at 1 kWh for the server room. That's dedicating an entire server to just one single solitary download. At least they set the lower bound at 0.

They also set the minimum energy cost of my router at 0.3 kWh or 300 Wh. I can get 1 Gigabyte in 15 minutes as congestion permits. Do they think that my router takes 1200 watts? Even my PS3 might only be 200 watts when it's really working, but just doing an idle background download it's going to be a lot lower, and lower still if I had a slim.

Something's not right with their numbers.

It's your understanding of the units.

A KWH is a measurement of energy not of work. So convert it to joules if you are having a hard time understanding it.
A KWH is 3.6 Megajoules

How about breaking it down to what it is. 0.3 kWh is a 300 watt device plugged in for 1 hour.

It breaks down to
X * 15 mins = 0.3 kWh
X would be a 1200 watt device.

My router doesn't eat that much power, but that's what their numbers are saying.

My understanding of the units is fine. Your "joules" just muddies the water.

 

[Something Amyss]

The author of this research works for Sony.

The facts covered by Fanghawk aside, I have trouble believing this is at issue since Sony is heavily pushing their own digital services.

 

[nickpy]

[...] Could disks be stamped somehow rather than burned?

Yes. This is how discs are mass-produced: They literally make a die and stamp the raw plastic, similar to how coins are made.

 

[V4Viewtiful]

Irrelevant when you consider coal, vehicles that run on gas and whatnot. Let's do away with those first.

Nag, just use peanut oil and chip fat with diesel engines

 

[halethrain]

The author of this research works for Sony.

Which author? You mean Amanda Webb? Because her biography says she's with the University of Surrey and studying energy use at Sony, not that she's an employee. Plus she's not the head writer on this study.

Or did you mean someone else?

Kieren Mayers: Dr. Kieren Mayers is Head of Technical Compliance at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, which
markets, distributes, and sells PlayStation(R) products and software across 110 countries worldwide,
and is responsible for environmental strategy and management as well as other compliance issues
within the company. He is also maintains an academic interest as an Executive in Residence at
INSEAD University in France and has published a number of articles on environmental subjects.
Kieren has over 15 year's experience working within the electronics, gaming, and recycling sectors.

 

[Revolutionary]

I don't like the statement that nearly all modern games are > 1.3 GB. Indie games are usually at the 500 - 990 MB range in my experience. It's usually only the bigger indie titles that exceed that size.

 

[renegade7]

I travel a lot so a lot of my gaming happens on a netbook, which means I'm restriced to much simpler and smaller games like FTL, Spacechem, and Dwarf Fortress, all of which are much less than 1.3 GB. You have to take the indie market into account, given that many of the extremely popular independent games are quite small in terms of file size and it would be incredibly wasteful to put that all on discs.

 

[FalloutJack]

Irrelevant when you consider coal, vehicles that run on gas and whatnot. Let's do away with those first.

Good luck with that. It'd be even harder than getting the gaming industry to revert to mostly physical media.

 

[crepesack]

1. We are looking at energy, not material costs of games.
2. Over 90% of energy is from gameplay. Not distribution. Distribution only makes a small difference in energy consumption.
3. What was evaluated was the energy to read and write and transport the discs. Not the shipping of said discs to the plant or the production of the discs.

 

[misg]

I have many questions on this as I really take issue with these numbers.
First off what is the cost of transportation?
What about the cost of having someone drive to go buy that disk?
The cost of having it sit in a store the cost of heating and powering that store over a year?
The Cost of having to make all those cases discs and paper sleeves for them? I this these numbers are way off and this was just scratching the surface of the costs here. \

Here is an article showing the cost per gig at about 3.8 cents to go around the world and that is with the author assuming a 400% markup by the ISP. With that even a 50Gb game would be 2 bucks to download. I really doubt anyone could mass produce and get a game into thousands of stores for that price.

Please also note I'm referring to cost as behind every price of an item is a cost in CO2 as energy costs money and energy produces CO2.

 

[Lightspeaker]

The author of this research works for Sony.

Which author? You mean Amanda Webb? Because her biography says she's with the University of Surrey and studying energy use at Sony, not that she's an employee. Plus she's not the head writer on this study.

Or did you mean someone else?

Kieren Mayers: Dr. Kieren Mayers is Head of Technical Compliance at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, which
markets, distributes, and sells PlayStation(R) products and software across 110 countries worldwide,
and is responsible for environmental strategy and management as well as other compliance issues
within the company. He is also maintains an academic interest as an Executive in Residence at
INSEAD University in France and has published a number of articles on environmental subjects.
Kieren has over 15 year's experience working within the electronics, gaming, and recycling sectors.

Post-Quinnpocalypse sleuthing! Great job.

Now, what possible motives could Sony have for wanting more disks? Don't they cut out the gamestop middleman by doing direct downloads?

Its far more likely they carried out this study because of the way rules and regulations with respect to carbon footprints for major corporations are put into place. Consequently its somewhat pertinent for them to be able to accurately report how much their company is putting out and figure out ways to reduce it and prove that reduction. They don't "want more discs"; what they want is to know which way is best so they can remain within regulations so they don't get fined.

Not everything has to be a conspiracy. These kinds of industry collaborations are fairly common and there are several in my own research department at any particular time.

 

[Hairless Mammoth]

With the way consoles makers are treating their online games sales, more and more people will trend towards physical media bought from online retailers not directly out to suck their wallets dry. The best deals are either on Steam, GoG, physical copies online or rarely in local stores. (Two of those exclude consoles, and the other two require driving at least from the warehouse/plant to the store or your home. So choices are limited on how to not impact the environment.) Then more energy will be spent on the Fedex/UPS trucks driving to even more doors per day. (It would be great if some nations' mail services got interested in partnering with stores like Amazon to make cheap deliveries for small packages like games and movies. They're already at you mailbox virtually every day.) So, even if this was true, it won't last for long.

I do wonder, though, how many server farms are utilizing the excess heat to warm the buildings in the winter? The theater I used to work at had all the projector exhausts shoot straight up through the roof into the great outdoors[footnote]The only reason I can think of why they'd do that is the ozone that's produced when the lamp ignites, but that amount is still very negligible. And, that issue isn't present in computers.[/footnote] when they could have dampers to divert the hot air back into the building when it's cold out. (The temps in the huge projection booths we had went up by almost 20 degrees F when a roof fan failed and we put "cheater" fans (duct boosters you can buy at the hardware store for $30) on just one projector.) I know servers need to stay nice and cool, but an HVAC engineer could design a system to divert that wasted energy and turn on a local ac unit if things got too hot just around the servers. It would help the situation in the article, and maybe the info in the article is taking into account any installation that does this.

 

[grigjd3]

I think this falls apart if we start talking about sales in the US. They're effectively saying that there is no cost for driving to the store and driving back. That price comes per disk, no bulk rates apply.

 

[PoolCleaningRobot]

I do wonder, though, how many server farms are utilizing the excess heat to warm the buildings in the winter? The theater I used to work at had all the projector exhausts shoot straight up through the roof into the great outdoors[footnote]The only reason I can think of why they'd do that is the ozone that's produced when the lamp ignites, but that amount is still very negligible. And, that issue isn't present in computers.[/footnote] when they could have dampers to divert the hot air back into the building when it's cold out. (The temps in the huge projection booths we had went up by almost 20 degrees F when a roof fan failed and we put "cheater" fans (duct boosters you can buy at the hardware store for $30) on just one projector.) I know servers need to stay nice and cool, but an HVAC engineer could design a system to divert that wasted energy and turn on a local ac unit if things got too hot just around the servers. It would help the situation in the article, and maybe the info in the article is taking into account any installation that does this.

Because people don't feel pressured to. You could actually do the opposite of what you just described with solar panels. Because they absorb heat, they could be placed on roofs to keep buildings cool during the summer rather than pay for a lot of AC. Hell, designing a building so that it's windows face away from the sun during summer and towards it during winter can also help. My campus had a special "green" building with no central air. Instead it had a reservoir of water that was cooled under ground during the winter and circulated through pipes to cool the building during summer. It was even cooler than most air conditioned buildings on campus

Now if we switched as many areas as possible to nuclear like we should have done decades ago, and France has already done, this wouldn't be an issue.

Amen. Too bad a lot of countries like Germany decided to get rid of nuclear after the Fukushima incident

 

[Risingblade]

So...better internet would be good for the environment...ok get to it environmentalist! I expect protests for better cheaper internet by Monday!

 

[Weaver]

Does it factor in the environmental effects of refining the oil involved in the plastic discs? I'm just finding it hard to believe sending 40 freighters over from China then having thousands of trucks bring product to a warehouse, then have tens of thousands of trucks deliver them to a store is somehow a better alternative than having computers which sit there on all day at pretty much peak capacity route me data.

It's not like your booting up a server that isn't already running, these things are taking power even if you do or don't download. Obviously a computer at peak processing takes more power, but I don't think your one game through the internet is going to rev up like 500 severs to maximum capacity.

 

[Yokta]

I think that this report overlooks a major factor that benefits digital over physical, and that's disposability.

Say you buy a game, play it for an hour and decide that you really don't want it in your house. If you bought a physical disc, you can send the DVD out to be recycled, but due to the complexity of the disc, the waste companies will have to spend energy, resources and time to separate the elements of the disc.

On the other hand, if your game is digital, you can just uninstall it. No mess, no leftovers, no hassle on the part of your local waste management center. This is one of the many reasons digital media is viewed as an ecologically friendly alternative to physical media.

 

[Strazdas]

Ah, research for sake of research with no logic involved. Digital download carbon emissions are exactly 0. Neither end user machines nor servers emit any carbon. As far as electricity consumed, this is irrelevant. for that you should look at making plants more carbon efficient, not force end users into middle ages (hey, before electricity was discovered we didnt use any).
This research also does not make sense in a form of tunnel vision. They take ALL the aspects of digital download and compare it to a single smal lfactor of retail distribution. have they accounted for plastic manufacturing, delivery via mail planes, users driving to gamestop, gamestop having to be run that uses electricity, ect? no, they didnt. because then they would see that their confirmation bias was wrong.

they also completely fail to factor in communication speed. For example me downloading a game in 3 minutes will use far less energy than somone running his PC for 2 week straight on a dialup connection.

Simply put, the amount of additional time you leave a console on when downloading a game(+ running servers servers and such), puts out more carbon then burning a game to a disk and delivering it to a retail store.

Neither console not servers put out ANY carbon. they dont breathe or burn.

I must be missing something, but I'm not sure what. Transmission costs? Hosting costs? Could disks be stamped somehow rather than burned?

the researchers are missing more than you ill give you that. but discs when manufactured en-mass are indeed "Stamped" instead of traditional burning.

They also set the minimum energy cost of my router at 0.3 kWh or 300 Wh. I can get 1 Gigabyte in 15 minutes as congestion permits. Do they think that my router takes 1200 watts?

Holy GabeN. My whole computer setup consisting of two monitors, computer, router, ect does not exceed 300wh when downloading. the router itself cannot even physically draw third of that without burning up. what kind of crazy measurements they are using? I dont know a single person who has a 1200watts setup, let alone router.

Irrelevant when you consider coal, vehicles that run on gas and whatnot. Let's do away with those first.

Nag, just use peanut oil and chip fat with diesel engines

wont work. diesel engines still work as combustion engines and thus produce large amounts of CO2. they just make less OTHER dangerous chemicals compared to Coal. as far as carbon goes burning is burning.