Let’s talk numbers. According to the environmental consulting firm Cleantech, which aggregated a series of studies, a single book generates about 7.5 kg of carbon dioxide equivalents—the value of all its greenhouse gas emissions expressed in terms of the impact of carbon dioxide. That includes production, transport, and either recycling or disposal. (Attention students: Your textbooks are particularly bad, releasing more than double the CO2 equivalents of the average book.)

Apple’s iPad generates 130 kg of carbon dioxide equivalents during its lifetime, according to company estimates. Amazon has not released numbers for the Kindle, but independent analysts put it at 168 kg. Those analyses do not indicate how much additional carbon is generated per book read (as a result of the energy required to host the e-bookstore’s servers and power the screen while you read), but they do include the full cost of manufacture, which likely accounts for the lion’s share of emissions. (The iPad uses just three watts of electricity while you’re reading, far less than most light bulbs.) If we can trust those numbers, then, the iPad pays for its CO2 emissions about one third-of the way through your 18th book. You’d need to get halfway into your 23rd book on Kindle to get out of the environmental red.

So far, electronic readers—not the machines, in this case, but their owners—are far surpassing that pace. Forrester Research estimates that the average user purchases three books per month. At that rate, you could earn back your iPad’s carbon dioxide in just six months.

» via Slate

In the countries studied, televisions made up the largest chunk of the e-waste stream by weight. China alone tossed more than one million tons of televisions in 2007. The 11 countries in the report also threw out more than a million tons of refrigerators and close to 700,000 tons of personal computers.

Those numbers are expected to rise. The report predicts that the number of computers tossed in India will increase 500 percent between 2007 and 2020. By 2020, the number of computers thrown out in South Africa and China will be up 200 to 400 percent. Trashed mobile phones will increase by 7-fold in China and 18-fold in India, while television e-waste in those countries may double.

» via Live Science

Down a road that winds through the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania, just across from a cow pasture, the bucolic scenery of Butler County is interrupted by a high chain-link fence topped with razor wire.

Cars entering the compound are channeled into gated lanes before being searched by a guard. A short distance beyond the security point, the road disappears into a gaping hole in a cliff face. The hole is sealed off by the thick, steel bars of a tall sliding gate controlled by guards carrying semiautomatic pistols. They are protecting a 25-foot-high passage that leads 22 stories down to Iron Mountain’s main archive facility, which takes up 145 acres of a 1,000-acre abandoned limestone mine.

Among dozens of red steel doors inserted in the rock face along corridors that create an elaborate subterranean honeycomb, you’ll find Room 48, an experiment in data center energy efficiency. Open for just six months, the room is used by Iron Mountain to discover the best way to use geothermal conditions and engineering designs to establish the perfect environment for electronic documents.

Room 48 is also being used to devise a geothermal-based environment that can be tapped to create efficient, low-cost data centers.

» via ComputerWorld

In the chill of a massive cave beneath an orthodox Christian cathedral in Helsinki, Finland, a city power firm is preparing what it thinks will be the greenest data center on the planet.

Excess heat from hundreds of computer servers to be located in the bedrock beneath Uspenski Cathedral, one of Helsinki’s most popular tourist sites, will be captured and channeled into the district heating network, a system of water-heated pipes used to warm homes in the Finnish capital.

“It is perfectly feasible that a quite considerable proportion of the heating in the capital city could be produced from thermal energy generated by computer halls,” said Juha Sipila, project manager at Helsingin Energia.

Seen at cnet news

Despite budget-breaking investment losses and widely fluctuating energy costs, many schools became greener during the last year, earning higher grades on the College Sustainability Report Card 2010. Released today on the new GreenReportCard.org website by the Sustainable Endowments Institute, a special project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the annual publication provides school profiles and grades along with exclusive insights about sustainability in higher education.

The profiled schools have combined holdings of more than $325 billion—approximately 95 percent of all higher education endowment assets. Widespread investment declines have impacted almost all schools, with the Report Card finding average endowment value dropping by 23 percent in the past year. With red ink dominating school budgets, did green expenditures get axed?

“Surprising the skeptics, most schools we surveyed did not let financial reversals undermine their green commitments,” said Mark Orlowski, executive director of the Sustainable Endowments Institute. “New financial realities encouraged saving money by adopting environmentally friendly innovations.”

OVERALL SUSTAINABILITY LEADERS

Amherst College

Arizona State University

Brown University

University of California - San Diego

Carleton College

College of the Atlantic

University of Colorado

Dickinson College

Harvard University

Luther College

Macalester College

Middlebury College

University of Minnesota

University of New Hampshire

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Oberlin College

Pacific Lutheran University

University of Pennsylvania

Pomona College

Smith College

Stanford University

University of Vermont

University of Washington

Wesleyan University

Williams College

Yale University