Saturday, March 15, 2014

Week Five

Hello again,

This is a continuation of my last post, detailing exactly what I have been up to in these last weeks. Because

When I left off, I was describing my difficulty in finding information on paper textbooks. 
I first checked for Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) about textbooks, but didn't find any. I had decided to wait until I met with the rest of the group to fill in the blanks about how much CO2 is produced by the creation of a paper textbook and how that relates to the amount of CO2 produced by a device that can read eBooks. 

The major problem I had this week was in trying to figure out how relate these values of energy used. I tried to find an method of comparing the CO2 produced by the method of using eBooks (including the production, transport, use, and disposal costs of the eReader, the servers holding the eBooks, and so on) and paper textbooks (production, transport, disposal, and number of textbooks required versus one eReader).

Because many of these values vary depending on what classes a student is taking, finding a way to present this information is very difficult. My current plan is to make a spreadsheet that can calculate the CO2 produced and figure out if getting an eReader is worth it, environmentally.

During the meeting, I asked for estimates for many of these values, only to find that there was not a commonly accepted answer.

I asked Professor Blowers how to continue researching and he pointed me to the library. On Monday, I will go to the library to ask the librarians how often textbooks are recycled and so on.

I also was asked to help a coworker of mine pull data from a ridiculously large government database. I will be working on that next week.

In other news, We do not have a meeting next week because of the U of A's Spring Break. I will be able to go the Arizona regional in FRC without worrying about missing a meeting!

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