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by IBM
3483 days ago
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Apple includes their suppliers, retail stores, offices, and customers' product use in their carbon footprint (in addition to data centers) [1]: When we measure our carbon footprint, we include hundreds of suppliers, millions of customers, and hundreds of millions of devices. And we’re always looking for ways to make the biggest difference in five major areas: manufacturing, product use, facilities, transportation, and recycling. [1] http://www.apple.com/environment/climate-change/ |
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Then lets do a back of the envelope calculation for energy consumption for Apple's aluminum use.
Very roughly Apple sells ~25 million macs and ~200 million iphones per year. Again lets assume that it needs 2kg of aluminum for macbooks and 100g for phones (not all iphones are aluminum and this might be lower), that makes ~70 thousand metric tonnes of aluminum.
Modern smelters use 13KW/h to produce 1 kilogram of aluminum, but their production involves recycled aluminum (and possibly shavings from milling?) so number should be lower, lets say it is 10KWH per kilo.
This makes 70M*10KWh = 700GW/h year
Google's datacenter energy consumption, is difficult to guess, if there are 1 million servers, and assuming each server consumes 10KWH per day, then it makes ~3.5 TWH per year.
This is apples to oranges of course, aluminum vs server running energy costs, but still kinda implies that Google uses more energy, at least directly.