Venkel Ltd., a producer of electronics components headquartered in Austin, Texas, has released an infographic that explores the sources of four conflict minerals, coined 3TG (tungsten, tantalum, tin and gold). This comes as the SEC finds itself embroiled in a clash over conflict mineral provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act.

Conflict minerals describe earth metals that come from the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Though the DRC is a relatively small producer in terms of the world market, its mining operations are inextricably tied to the violence that grips the country, adding more than its share to global suffering.

It matters, to both electronics makers and consumers, because their gadgets could be financing the atrocities in the region, however indirectly. The issue has gained exposure in recent years, prompting some big tech companies like Intel and Apple to rethink their materials sourcing practices. U.S. lawmakers took a stand and passed provisions requiring electronics manufacturers to track the stuff in their supply lines as part of Dodd-Frank – effectively banning conflict minerals lest they invite a PR disaster.

The human toll

Venkel’s infographic dispenses some startling numbers, most notably how much of the revenue derived from mining fuels the conflict. Like, for instance, the fact that the conflict has claimed 5.4 million lives as of 1998, with 45,000 perishing each month.

The connection to conflict minerals is made more clear when you follow the money. Of the $130 million in revenue derived from tin, more than half, $80 million, funded the war in 2009.

Enough said.

View the full infographic below or visit Venkel for more insights.

Images courtesy of Venkel, Ltd.

Are the PC’s days numbered?

Personally, they’ll have to pry the keyboard from my cold, dead hands. But not for 46 percent of Americans that believe tablets will replace laptops according to a recent study by Poll Position.

The survey, conducted earlier this month, reveals that for a huge chunk of the population, tablets may fulfill their mobile computing needs. And then there’s this surprising statistic that defies the conventional wisdom that all kids these days are flocking to tablets.

In fact, it turns out that nearly half of the 18-29 year-olds polled, 49 percent of them do not think tablets will replace PCs versus the 37 percent that think otherwise.

Boys and their (tech) toys

If you’ve watched the infamous iPad episode of Modern Family, then you know how grown men love their shiny new slates. A side note: the character stricken with iPad-lust, Phil Dunphy, is within the 30-60 age-range of people most likely to believe that tablets will replace PCs. (53 percent for 30-44 year olds, 52 percent for 45-64 year olds.)

Getting back on track…

According to Poll Position, “Men favored electronic tablets over women with 53% of men saying electronic tablets will eventually take the place of laptop computers versus 39% of women picking the tablets over laptops.” That seems to roughly square with people I see with iPads and other tablets on the subway, in cafes and at airports. But the ladies like their tablets too, so expect to see those figures shift upward soon.

Image credit: Apple

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, Americans stand to save $450 million in electricity costs a year if they switched to LEDs.

Of course, not everyone has warmed to the lighting tech. In this Wall Street Journal piece, the author discovers that some traditionalists can’t get past the cold, artificial lighting cast by some LEDs. But that’s not putting a dent in their growing popularity.

Part of the reason is a healthy drop in prices. A starter, 35-light set from Lowe’s can be had for under $4.00. Compare that to 2005, when early models cost about $15. And manufacturers are getting better at mimicking the look of incandescent bulbs so that decorators can achieve the same look minus the hefty electric bill.

And if there’s a time to eke out savings, the holidays are it.

Source: WSJ
Image credit: Flickr user TPorter2006 – CC

How much e-waste does the U.S. government generate? According to General Services Administration (GSA) head Martha Johnson, “By some estimates, the federal government goes through 10,000 computers a week.”

And that’s not the only staggering statistic in this Washington Post/Bloomberg article that examines the steps the GSA and EPA are taking to combat e-waste and boost a U.S. recycling industry that currently employs 30,000 workers and generates $5 billion in revenue each year. This entails the adoption of a third party certification standard that would dictate how the federal government recycles its IT equipment — paving the way for industry at large to follow suit.

The two front runners are E-Stewards (notable for banning the export of e-waste to developing regions) and the business-friendlier Responsible Recycling or R2 certs. For now, be sure to keep an eye on this fight as it could very well end up influencing your business’ IT procurement and recycling policies.

Update: Below you’ll find links to more info on the certs mentioned in this post.

EPA: Certification Programs for Electronics Recyclers
e-Stewards Certification
Responsible Recycling R2

via @ecoATM

Image courtesy of Ulises Jorge, Flickr – CC

Where in the world?!

Before we get to all those juicy statistics, REN21 came through with a little tech for infoporn addicts by debuting an online Renewables Interactive Map to coincide with the release of the group’s Renewables 2011 Global Status Report. As with all good interactive maps, it’s infinitely clickable and searchable. As a cleantech resource, it provides a handy overview of any given country’s progress on the renewables front, including info on things like incentives that help determine a region’s commitment to green energy along with a slew of other informative stats.

Speaking of stats, REN21′s aforementioned report, paints a relatively healthy picture for renewable energy, quite a feat considering the shaky global economy. Last year, according to the group’s findings, “renewable energy supplied an estimated 16% of global final energy consumption and delivered close to 20% of global electricity production.” In the U.S., renewables reached 10.9 percent of primary energy production, an increase of 5.6 percent from 2009, which helped close, and eventually surpass, the gap between green energy and nuclear power.

On the investment front, renewable energy companies, utility-scale generation and biofuel projects raked in $143 billion. Of that, China took in just over a third of that figure at $48.5 billion.

Prodding through policy

Policy is proving to be a big driver for the global green energy growth spurt. In 2010, 119 countries had policies and/or incentives in place to spur development, more than double the number of nations that had such support systems in place a scant five years earlier in 2005. According to the report, which was compiled by Worldwatch Institute Senior Fellow Janet Sawin and a team of researchers, more than half those countries hail from emerging markets.

Other highlights from the report include:

• Renewable capacity now comprises about a quarter of total global power-generating capacity and supplies close to 20% of global electricity, with most of this provided by hydropower.

• Developing countries (collectively) have more than half of global renewable energy power.

• The top five countries for non-hydro renewable power capacity were the United States, China, Germany, Spain, and India.

• China led the world in the installation of wind turbines and solar thermal systems and was the top hydropower producer in 2010. The country added an estimated 29 GW of grid-connected renewable capacity, for a total of 252 GW, an increase of 13% compared with 2009.

• Renewables accounted for about 26% of China’s total installed electric capacity in 2010, 18% of generation, and more than 9% of final energy supply.

• In the European Union, renewables represented an estimated 41% of newly installed electric capacity. While this share was significantly lower than the more than 60% of new capacity in 2009, more renewable power capacity was added in Europe than ever before.

• The EU exceeded its 2010 targets for wind, solar PV, concentrating solar thermal power, and heating/heat pumps. Countries including Finland, Germany, Spain, and Taiwan raised their targets, and South Africa, Guatemala, and India, among others, introduced new ones.

For a deep dive into the numbers, including some revealing details of what types of renewables are picking up steam (and where), download the full report here (pdf).

How timely.

Just in time for a heatwave that’s slamming us here in East Coast of the United States, the pixelsmiths at One Block Off the Grid (1BOG) have a nice, stats-infused infographic. In Cool House, Fat Wallet, 1BOG examines the impact of AC on home energy consumption. And given how popular air conditioning systems have become during the past few decades — from 27 percent to 55 percent adoption in a scant two decades (1980-2001) — a lot of folks are surely feeling the heat, if not in their living rooms, then surely on their household budgets.

Except, of course, if you’re rockin’ some solar panels.

According to a poll run by the company, only 9 percent of solar homeowners said their bills rose by more than $50 a month due to air conditioning versus 20 percent of homeowners that derived their power from the grid. And check out some of the “cool comments” section for some astonishing tales of big savings.

Check out the rest of the infographic below or head on over to 1BOG for the full-sized version.

Some interesting news from the green jobs front today. According to a new study, 2.7 million Americans are gainfully employed in “clean economy” jobs, surprisingly beating out some long-established sectors. From WSJ:

The study, by researchers at the Brookings Institution and Battelle, concluded that the U.S. clean economy employs more workers than the fossil-fuel and bioscience industries, but less than the information-technology sector.

The South has the largest number of clean-economy jobs, although the West has the largest share relative to its population, according to the study.

Overall, California leads in green jobs, employing nearly 320,000 people, 90,000 of which are making the LA metro area an eco-hotspot.

But take the study’s findings with a grain of salt. As The Los Angeles Times notes, Brookings’ definition of a green job stretches somewhat dubiously beyond solar panel and wind turbine manufacturing into sectors like public transport.

Image Credit: Flickr user dalvenjah – CC

What does the cloud look like in 2011? What’s it made of?

Thanks to a survey conducted by BitNami, Cloud.com and cloud management firm Zenoss, we have a fascinating new snapshot of the cloud market. With the help of 500 IT professionals, the companies were able to get a bead on some of the factors that are driving cloud adoption, and what technologies (and vendors) that adoption favors.

For instance, here are some interesting stats that shed light into corporate priorities at the moment:

According to the survey results, the top factor influencing the use of cloud computing is scalability (61%), followed by overall cost savings (54%) and easier management (53%). However, of the Chief Technical Officers surveyed, scalability (71%) was the most popular driver of cloud adoption, followed by elasticity or the need to adjust to fluctuations in resource demands (61%).

So companies are moving to the cloud for growth, pure and simple. CTOs in particular seem to be feeling the pressure to keep pace with the explosion of data and the many ways businesses derive value from that data. It sure explains why data centers are constantly cropping up lately.

One unsurprising revelation is that VMware dominates when it comes to virtualization. One curious thing to note is that Hyper-V is running neck-and-neck with some open source hypervisors, suggesting that Microsoft’s efforts in this arena are starting to paying off. This comes even as a majority of those polled reporting that they employ open source solutions whenever possible. When it comes to virtualization, it seems, a lot of them don’t stick to this mindset.

I hope your scrollwheel is up to the task because the full infographic awaits below.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Today’s infographic comes from the Smart Jobs special report at Wired (click here to view the full version). And should provide America’s battered workforce some valuable insights.

At 56.8 percent, the renewables and environment category saw the biggest percentage gains among seven million U.S. job hoppers on LinkedIn during the past five years. (On a side note, it seems to shed some light on how LinkedIn groups its members career choices.)

Here’s a snippet from the article that perfectly captures the essence of the evolving American employment picture. Incidentally, it also describes the kind of work that seekers of green jobs can expect to find.

Smart jobs tend to scramble the line between blue-collar and white-collar. Their titles tend toward the white (technician, specialist, analyst), but the underlying industries often tend toward the blue, toward the making of physical stuff. Smart jobs can involve factories and machines, plastics and chemicals, but operating those instruments and manipulating those materials demands far more brains than brawn. Even though some of these jobs are nominally in old-fashioned industries, visit the factories and shops and fields and you’ll find that these industries are in the process of being utterly transformed.

I also encourage you to point your browser to another infographic in the series,
The Emerging Epicenters of High Tech Industry, for a look at where job growth percolating and in which industries. For instance, how about Fort Collins, Colorado is automotively-inclined greentechies? Maybe Reading, Pennsylvania for next-gen car batteries?

Take a look. Heck, it might help you land that smart, green job you’re looking for.

Last week’s Uptime Institute Symposium 2011 event not only brought together data center experts, it also delivered the goods for stat monkeys in the form of the group’s first-ever industry survey results. After a bout of “excitement” from the techies in attendance (riiiiight), the group let loose with the findings, which include…

• 74% of respondents had deployed or were considering some form of cloud computing, primarily private cloud.
• 36% of data center facilities would run out of space, power or cooling in 2011-2012.
• Over 70% of the respondents measure PUE, and report an average PUE between 1.6-1.99

But here’s the most startling data point: “Less than 20% of respondents’ IT departments pay the data center power bill, a financial structure that makes it far more difficult to drive data center energy efficiency.” No wonder there’s no incentive for IT departments to green up their act. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Bean counters for Sustainable IT

When faced with this data, it’s easy to chalk it up to bureaucracy, corporate myopia or a hundred other reasons why many companies react S L O W L Y to market conditions. Realistically, it could simply be a matter of not knowing where/how to start. Here’s a thought…

Why not let the numbers guys and gals take the lead?

GreenResearch’s David Schatsky unearthed a great insight from Richard Ellis, Group Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at Alliance Boots, which appeared in a recent International Federation of Accountants report. Ellis advises:

Given its expertise in managing and reporting on quantitative data and credibility that finance departments generally have when it comes to presenting financial data, having finance be responsible for environmental data raises the profile and credibility of the measures of a company’s environmental performance. Richard and the finance director jointly present this non-financial information to their board of directors.

It makes sense that finance departments — they keep the keenest eye on a company’s bottom line, after all — would wield some major influence. Enlisting its help will provide some much-needed visibility into the costs and environmental impact of IT. This is a good first step into pinpointing and separating out IT’s real financial footprint. And it’s a good motivator to start shifting the financial burden on IT execs, which in turn should lead to smarter, eco-friendlier decisions.

[via @dschatsky]