Hello all, I am starting to think about the mobile phone as a green technology. I am just staring to work out ideas here but I think that the mobile phone can support energy efficiency in some ways, it can help reduce waste in transportation, there is a sense that it can replace "atoms with bits" and there is also a largely unsolved aspect of the mobile phone as a source of waste.
Taking these in order, I think that the mobile phone can help to make the automobile based system more efficient. Just as with industrial drivers (taxis and delivery cars) where a central dispatching makes the management of the "fleet" more efficient, the same principle applies to the mobile phone. Instead of coming all the way home just to find out that you have to drive out to pick up the kids at soccer, micro-coordination makes automobile use more efficient. I think that this is the case, but it would be good to study this in order to determine if it were real. Another way that mobile communication could make the transportation system more efficient is if location functionality were "baked into" cars. If real time traffic flow information could be monitored to find traffic jams and further if drivers who are moving towards jams could be re-routed via some type of smart traffic information system, we would avoid stop and go traffic that is probably less efficient that evenly flowing traffic. Replacing atoms with bits is an old Negroponte saw. We are, however, starting to see it in the sense that newspaper are being sent to devices like the Kindle. To the degree that this replaces the physical distribution of newspapers it not only saves cost for the newspaper industry but it also reduces the environmental costs of distribution. Currently it is often difficult to read newspapers on small handset screens. In addition, the issue of electricity, batteries, etc. mitigate the benefits of this to some degree. The third general area is that to the degree that the mobile phone can facilitate the functioning of markets through supporting information transfer, it can help to reduce waste. This was one of the main messages of Robert Jensen's article on fishing in India. In that case, the enhanced information on the need for fish at the different ports reduced the need to dump fish when there was a surplus. The data shows that by using the mobile phone, the fishers could always find a market for their fish at one or another port and thus they eliminated dumping of fish in markets where the supply exceeded the demand. The final area is the contribution of mobiles to environmental problems. Specifically when mobiles become waste, they are full of a lot of bad stuff that needs to be handled correctly. The lead, arsenic, antimony, beryllium, cadmium, copper, etc. need to be taken care of. The other reusable elements need to be reused and the silver, copper, platinum, and gold need to be recovered. These are first thoughts. I am sure that there is a lot of good work being done out there on all these issues. I am interested in any comments or extensions. Rich L. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mobile-society" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mobile-society?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
