Most of us have old computers or electronic devices in our basements. Among my “collection” was a huge CRT computer display. Not a flat panel — a huge old-fashioned monitor. My back hurt for days from lifting it. Not only did it weigh 100 pounds or so but it cost a small fortune in electricity and has a very ugly carbon footprint. I had not used the CRT display for years but one day I decided it was time for it to stop taking up space in the basement. How to get rid of it?
Too big to put in the trash and dangerous in the event the CRT got broken and gasses escaped. A quick search on the web revealed that BestBuy was the closest recycling program to where I live. I loaded up the truck and visited their store on a Sunday afternoon. They charged $10 but gave me a gift card for the same amount.  The young macho man who assisted me grabbed the monster display from the back of the truck and nearly dropped it. I hope his back feels better than mine, but one thing for sure is that the environment is better off by taking this monster out of circulation.
Whatever you believe about the effect of green house gasses, there is a compelling financial reason to be aggressive in reducing your footprint. Another dinosaur in my basement was an old PC server with a half-terabye of RAID storage in it. I used the "redundant array of inexpensive disks" as a backup server — music, photos, and data files of all kinds. (see various stories here in the blog about backup). It had served me well but then one day I learned about the Kill-A-Watt Meter. After plugging the server into the meter and later checking the reading I found that the server was using $50 per month of electricity. I then bought an Iomega StorCenter terabyte external hard drive which I placed on top of the now powered down rack in the basement. It is a tiny fraction of the size and uses a tiny fraction of the electricity. The setup was trivial.
I was proud of the savings but then I learned about iDrive.com. The online backup storage service costs $4.95 per month — for 150 gigabytes; free for 2 gigabytes) and brought my in-house electrical bill for backup to zero. The "backup in the clouds" solution has been totally reliable and automatically keeps all of my files backed up. Cloud computing is compelling but moving your servers and storage to the clouds does not eliminate the issue of greenhouse gasses — it just moves it to the cloud provider. How big is their footprint? I don’t know the answer but I am confident that with thousands of servers (not just one in the basement) that they are highly motivated to be energy efficient. Helping data centers become more efficient (and green) has become a really big business for IBM and others, and as footprint consciousness increases companies will ask their providers not only about their security and scalability but also about their policies and practices for handling their equipment recycling and their data center electrical usage.
Speaking of Cloud Computing, there is an interesting new post at Irving’s blog about "The Big Shift: from Scalable Efficiency to Scalable Learning".