Even if you love your trusty home computer, you could get more efficiency out of a new one. You might have become comfortable with your device and want to stick with it even if it’s a dinosaur of the tech industry. But computers wear out and become obsolete quickly in today’s fast-paced market.
Some signs it might be time to replace your computer are slow operations, compatibility issues, outdated security, noisy fans, expensive repairs and an obsolete operating system.
In addition to improving some of those problems to make your work or play more efficient, replacing your old computer with one that qualifies for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star certification can deliver substantial savings in power-use costs and energy efficiency. Energy Star-certified computers use 25%–40% less electricity than other models.
Desktop computers, integrated desktops, laptop computers, small-scale servers, tablets and workstations are all eligible for the Energy Star certification.
Qualified devices must meet energy-use guidelines in three distinct operating modes: standby, sleep and active use. This approach ensures energy savings in standby mode, as well as when a computer is active and performing a range of tasks.
Power-management capabilities are important to saving energy, especially since computers are often in use more hours per day than they used to be. Energy Star power-management features place computers into a low-power sleep mode after a designated period of inactivity.
If all computers sold in the U.S. were built to Energy Star’s standards, the country would save more than $1.1 billion in annual energy costs and would prevent greenhouse gas emissions equal to taking nearly 350,000 cars off the road, according to the Department of Energy.
If the computer you’re replacing is less than 5 years old, first consider donating it to a school or a nonprofit organization. These groups put technology donations to good use and frequently offer pickup and processing services that make it easy to donate. Just make sure you remove all your personal information, data and files from the computer before giving it a new home.
If you don’t donate your computer, you should recycle it. Computers contain substances that need to be disposed of properly (such as lead, mercury and PCBs) as well as valuable materials that can be recovered during the recycling process (such as copper, palladium and tin). Recovering these materials through recycling, rather than manufacturing new ones, conserves natural resources and the energy put into mining and manufacturing.
Visit earth911.com/category/how-to-recycle to find out where to recycle computers in your community.
