It's Easy Being Green

May 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jon Chappell

           

MAKE YOUR PERSONAL STUDIO ECO-FRIENDLY AND COST-EFFICIENT, TOO

Photo: shutterstock.com

Is your studio contributing to global warming and other environmental problems? Unfortunately, the answer is almost certainly yes. Between the electrical energy you use to run your gear, the climate-control system in your studio (that is, your heater and your air conditioner), and the disposable media and old gear you throw out, you are, statistically speaking, adding to the problem.

That problem, of course, is the pollution of the environment from greenhouse gases and other harmful elements, the depletion of nonrenewable energy sources, and the taxing of the earth's already-bulging capacity to contain the waste we have created. And members of the developed Western world (obviously, personal-studio recordists are just a minuscule fraction of that group) are among the worst culprits. The root of the problem is consumption: the oil used to run vehicles; the coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy used to heat and power homes and businesses; and the energy used in the manufacture and distribution of goods.

In light of these ecological challenges, it's in the best interest of all members of society to adhere to eco-friendly habits in their daily lives. As a home-studio recordist, you are in a position to couple your home and professional lifestyles and adopt many conservation measures with great efficiency. In this article, I'll take a look at the key areas in which you can reduce consumption, lower your negative impact on the environment, and operate your studio in a greener way.

Recycling, Life Cycling

An excellent way to start being a better eco-citizen is by putting less junk into the planet's landfills. You likely recycle plastic and paper goods from your home, but what about those CDs and DVDs that you use in your studio? They are a recycling nightmare. Discarded CDs, in particular, are a horrible example of wastefulness; recordists must use the low-capacity, write-once kind to create audio discs that will play in regular CD players, so that nonrenewable technology quickly becomes waste. And until recently, you couldn't recycle CDs because in addition to their plastic core, they contained aluminum, lacquer, and other chemicals that made them problematic for recycling facilities to handle.

Fortunately, that's changing, and many towns now take CDs and DVDs away at curbside — but you must check with your particular municipality first. If you need to destroy the data on certain CDs before disposing of them (because, say, they contain sensitive backup data), don't zap them in the microwave, as some people suggest. That may obliterate the data, but it uses a lot of juice and creates another problem by increasing your energy consumption — just to perform a small task. Instead, grab some gloves and heavy-duty scissors and cut the discs in half.

Unlike a CD's relatively simple construction, a computer is made up of a complicated jumble of metals and plastics. But computers should still be recycled rather than dumped into a landfill. Patrick Stefurak, a recording engineer and eco-journalist, suggests, “Donate your computer to a school. That's a form of recycling — by keeping it in use, even though it leaves your possession. A school doesn't need state of the art, and you get a tax write-off.”

Even if you have to remove your computer's hard drive for security purposes, or you remove other components, most school districts have IT departments that can refurbish and reuse computers, says Stefurak. “The best way to recycle is to keep something alive. It helps another person and prevents them from having to spend more money to buy something new, which in itself reduces consumption.”

If you have old, obsolete gear (analog signal processors, outboard graphic EQs, and so on), Stefurak points out that selling and buying used gear is a form of recycling: “It delays new-gear purchases for the buyer — reducing consumption — and it's good for your pocketbook. In this way, craigslist is helping the environment. Most of us have a lot of gear we don't use for an extended time. This means we're paying to store it and heat it while it collects dust — and it gets in our way. Letting someone else ‘borrow’ your unused gear is a good way to store it and do the maintenance on it.” And if you can't find a happy new home for your computer gear, many towns and municipalities have computer and electronics recycling days, when you can drop off your old computers, monitors, and peripherals.

Electron Reduction

Recycling is important, but it's even more critical to reduce your energy consumption. Doing so benefits the earth in two ways: it slows the depletion of nonrenewable resources — chiefly oil, natural gas, and coal — and it lessens pollution, including the production of carbon dioxide, which accelerates global warming. In the United States, most oil goes to transportation, and most natural gas and nuclear, hydro, and coal fuels go to generating electrical power. So there are twin, pressing obligations for us to change our driving habits and rethink how we juice up our buildings. Because driving isn't really a part of the home-recording process (unless you count the car-stereo mix test), in this article I'll focus on electrical power and the home studio.

Without electricity, you would be unable to operate your studio. After all, it's not as if you can switch to a wood-burning DAW. So given that the flow of electrons is a vital component of studio operation, it's intriguing that most recordists — even technically minded ones who know the specs of their gear cold — don't know how much electrical power they consume. Do you know, for example, what it is your utility company charges you for? Here's a hint: your monthly statement lists your use of kilowatt-hours (or kWh). So is the company billing you in units of a) power, b) energy, c) time, or d) some combination of the three? The answer is energy, and the clue is in the combined terms of watt and hours. A watt is a unit of power (the rate of energy transferred, or energy divided by time). And if you multiply that by a time factor (in this case, hours), the result is an energy unit: W × T = E, or watt-hours (Wh).

Bills, Bills, Bills

Because a watt is rather small stuff in daily-living (and billable) terms, the utility uses the unit of the kilowatt (1,000 watts). So if you burn a 60W lightbulb for two hours, you'll be charged for 0.12 kWh. At a typical rate of $0.15 per kWh, leaving that light on in your living room while you do a mixdown in your control room costs you $0.018, or just less than two cents. Not a huge penalty for such a “mistake,” but if you extrapolate that out over a year, along with all the other energy you waste without even realizing it, the cents can add up to a lot.

And it's not just the money wasted; it's the extra electricity that the power plant has to manufacture. Now remember, I'm not just talking about you. I'm talking about the entire population of the United States — more than 300 million people (see the sidebar “Watts Up”).

So the simplest thing you can do to reduce energy consumption immediately is to turn off the lights when you aren't using them — even if only for a minute. (By the way, there's no truth to the rumor that turning on a light consumes more energy than just leaving it on.) You can also replace an incandescent bulb with a CFL (compact fluorescent lamp), which I'll cover in the section called “Light Me Up.” But “turning it off” is what all eco-conscious experts advocate — and not just for lightbulbs. Any device that is left either on or in standby mode draws energy. It may be a tiny amount, but the utility company is certainly tracking it — and charging you for it.

Green Gadgetry

Just as recording technology is continually improving, so are the materials and the machines specifically designed to manage energy use. Although using green products is not a substitute for good conservation habits, it can definitely help.

FIG. 1: Auralex’s StudioFoam Eco uses a soy-based additive and, as a result, contains less petroleum than previous formulations.

Auralex produces several eco-friendly products, including its new StudioFoam Eco (see Fig. 1). Tim Martin, Auralex's director of sales, describes the new foam: “Instead of a petroleum-based additive, we went to a soy-based additive and reduced our petroleum use for the creation of this foam by 60 percent. It's actually improved our product from the durability and longevity perspective, and it also holds color better than our previous formulations. The best part is there's no perceptible difference. We would have been hesitant to release it otherwise, but we were able to improve the product, go green, and maintain the acoustical quality that Auralex is known for.”

Not all companies are as active in making their products eco-friendly as Auralex is. One persistently annoying aspect of technology — the dreaded wall wart, or the external power supply — still plagues recordists, even on some of the latest gear. These evil little devices hide out in plain view and suck energy 24/7 without your even realizing it. Power supplies aren't just a menace to your power strip's real estate; they also pull energy when they shouldn't — especially on devices without a power switch (like your USB hub).

FIG. 2: A Smart Strip will automatically shut off the power to unused gear when it senses no current draw.

Fortunately, there's a tidy way to quash wall warts when they aren't in use: put them all on a power strip and manage them through a master control switch. If you chain your power strips together, keeping the master (the one that plugs into the wall outlet) accessible, then you can turn off all your wall warts with a single switch. But there's an even more intelligent way to manage your power connections: add a brain to the chain. “Smart” power strips, such as the Smart Strip (see Fig. 2) from Bits Limited, use a sensing technology that can determine whether a device is turned on or off, based on how much current it draws. If the strip decides that the unit is off, then it will shut down the circuit entirely, making sure that even small amounts of current don't leak through. In this way, smart strips act similarly to gates — their counterparts in the audio domain. In addition, other outlets are slaved to this master outlet, so when the master is off, all subsequent outlets are shut down as well.

One way to set this up is to put your computer's CPU in the master outlet and have all peripherals (printer, USB hub, and so on) in the slave outlets. When the CPU is off, the peripherals automatically shut down.

If you're nervous about turning off your CPU every night and rebooting it in the morning, at least turn off your monitor and all your peripherals. Hard drives are much more reliable than they were in the past, but people still don't like to have to watch their computers boot and load system utilities. So if you don't want to turn off your computer during your workweek or a mission-critical project, at least turn if off for the weekend.

Of course, even the smartest power strips aren't as crafty as technology that's specifically designed to reduce your energy draw over the long term. Several devices of varying complexity and expense are available that monitor how much energy you use in your daily activities. The Kill A Watt, from P3 International, is a meter that measures how much energy a particular device uses. In addition to accurately monitoring a unit's energy consumption — including specific data such as volts, amps, and watts — the display offers other diagnostic tools and features a calculator that forecasts projected costs and converts energy use into dollars per month.

If you leave a meter plugged in between your power strip and the power amp for a month, you can get a very accurate picture of how much energy that amp is drawing. This feedback is the first step in understanding how much energy you actually use, and can inspire you to set goals for reduction.