Climate Change Week – Be Part Of The Solution!


Now this came as a surprise to me: YTL actually sponsoring a Climate Change Week. Not that YTL’s environmental vision is different from other corporate citizens around the world, but just that after being in Singapore for so long, I didn’t even see such a public declaration of environmental awareness by any local Singapore company.

Be Part of the Solution!

  1. Change a light.
    Replacing six regular light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs will save 400kg of carbon dioxide a year.
    (I just did 3 bulbs for my living room – how about you?)
  2. Drive less.
    Walk, bike, carpool or take public transport more often. You’ll save 1.5kg of carbon dioxide for every 5km you don’t drive!
    (Hmm, I’m guilty of this – today I tried the train with my new shoe and now it’s full of blisters behind… but I’ll still try to drive less)
  3. Recycle more.
    You can save 1,000kg of carbon dioxide per year by recycling just half of your household waste.
    (Hey I champion this! Everyone say I’m a recycle freak! Every piece of paper that’s of a reasonable size definitely goes into the recycle pile. Colleagues toss the papers in the bin? I’ll pick them up and put them in my recycle pile. You should come see my plastic bottle collection – but come before the Karung Guni husband and wife team comes)
  4. Check your tyres.
    Keeping your tyres inflated properly can improve your car’s fuel efficiency. Every litre of petrol saved keeps 2.5kg of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere!
    (Checked!)
  5. Use less hot water.
    It takes a lot of energy to heat water – use less hot water by installing an energy efficient triple A rated showerhead (3 tonnes of carbon dioxide saved per year) and washing your clothes in cold or warm water (225kg saved per year).
    (Hmm.. washing cloths no big issue – cold water is fine, although conservation of water in S’pore is quite high on priority currently; showering is a bit of a dilemma. I actually like the kind of “shared” hot water facilities that I used to see in USA. In my current flat, the water has to be “boiled” before bathing. And it’s rather hard to time how long it takes to boil just enough water for showering)
  6. Avoid products with a lot of packaging.
    You can save 545kg of carbon dioxide if you cut down your garbage by 10%.
    (Wow! Plastic bags count?)
  7. Move your thermostat down 2 degrees in winter and up 2 degrees in summer.
    You could save about 900kg of carbon dioxide a year with this simple adjustment.
    (Or just like me, don’t turn on the aircond – just point the fan point blank when it’s hot)
  8. Plant a tree.
    A single tree will absorb one tonne of carbon dioxide over its lifetime.
    (Did it 10 years ago… not very practical currently, but will plant another when there’s actually LAND in front of my front gate)
  9. Turn off electronic devices.
    Simply turning off your television, DVD player, stereo, and computer when you’re not using them will save you thousands of kilograms of carbon dioxide a year.
    (Actually I started adopting this when I went to JC in 98. I still practise it currently, but not as religiously as before. I guess a lot has to do with who you stay with. On top of that, there are different “levels” of turning off, e.g. do you have to turn off the socket as well?)
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5 Responses

  1. On item 9 above, there was a study/report a while ago that significant amount of electricity is actually consumed (wasted) by electronic devices on standby mode. So, for instance, it’s not good enough to simply just press the “off” button on your remote control of the TV; the TV set is still semi-alive wasting electricity, awaiting for your “on” signal from the remote.

    But then there is an argument that having too many mechanical on-off will shorten lifespan of the devices, hence not environmental-friendly. But since the priority now is global warming due to carbon emission, so it is still ok, no?

  2. Err… how long does these electronic devices last anyway? Something else is probably going to give way before this start stop cycle kills it, perhaps with a few exceptions…

    Scouring the Internet yields those that have to charge / discharge some huge capacitor-like component like metal halide lamp in projectors, or maybe create burnt scars due to sparks during contact such as those mini relays at the switch (http://www.mikroe.com/en/books/keu/10.htm).

    No one have been able to give a ballpark as to how to trade off standby vs switching on/off though. For example, my PJ home TV is always switched off (coz you tend to feel very “magnetize” when you walk pass it) but the ASTRO box is always left on (for software updates). Or, the air cond’s fused switch is always turned off in PJ (so it’s a 2 step process to turn on/off the air cond) but in SG, my landlord pasted a big warning sign warning never to turn off the fuse (presumably tripped the electronic circuit numerous times before we moved in).

    But I’m sure those Sun servers should be turned off because it’s too damn noisy 😉

  3. Those Sun servers: only the noisiest V20Z is running now. Only if I have a remotely controlled robotic arm to press those power buttons at will…

    (Of course the correct answer is iLO or wake-on-LAN.)

  4. After reading your comment on “those noisy Sun servers”, I actually spent some time to understand the current iLO implementations (Sun and HP go on different directions, as usual). Now you will notice that our lab is very quiet, with the aircon set to minimum operating level and the heat level almost negligible. And yet the flexibility to access any of those (more powerful, newer) servers over the weekend remains, that they can be powered up at will remotely via our network. This is the beauty of remote management via iLO. And many kgs of carbon prevented from going into our atmosphere.

    [Too bad that the older servers are without iLO. I have decided to make them unaccessible over the weekend.]

    I actually went through the process and wrote this down to demonstrate that each of us can do our part if we have the will.

    Finally, thank you for reminding. 🙂

  5. lol… wait, let me see what is iLO… (I’ve only dealt with ILOG recently, not iLO keke)

    We have yet to see solution on _automatic_ fire up / down (without a prescheduled cronjob) of servers happening. Granted that UD or whatsoever we choose to centralize the deployment management can do tricks, I rather it works out of the box, e.g.

    Menu
    Press 1: Optimize data center based on application performance
    Press 2: Optimize data center based on energy consumption
    Press 3: Optimize data center based on minimum hardware
    Press 0: Customized optimizations (download customized heuristics from XXX vendor)

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