Business likewise is undergoing fundamental shifts with a new emphasis on sustainability and a triple bottom line. The concept of sustainability often carries overtones of "environmentally friendly" or "green", but actually deals more broadly with the ability of a company to meet its goals today as well as position itself to meet them in the future. Couple environmental concerns with economic and social concerns, and you have the triple bottom line on which many companies today are reporting. Information technology again not only can be a catalyst and vehicle of effective execution, but it raises many relevant concerns of its own in this area. As John Thakara points out in "In the Bubble"[footnotes shown as such], "it takes 1.7 kilograms of materials to make a microchip with 32 megabytes of random-access memory-a total of 630 times the mass of the final product. The 'fab' of a basic memory chip, and running it for the typical life span of a computer, eats up eight hundred times the chip's weight in fossil fuel. Thousands of potentially toxic chemicals are used in the manufacturing process"¦ The amount of waste matter generated in the manufacture of a single laptop computer is close to four thousand times its weight on your lap. Fifteen to nineteen tons of energy and materials are consumed in the fabrication of one desktop computer. To compound matters: As well as being resource-greedy to make, information technology devices also have notoriously short lives. The average compact disc is used precisely once in its life, and every gram of material that goes into the production and consumption of a computer ends up rather quickly as either an emission or solid waste. In theory, electronic products have technical services lives on the magnitude of thirty years, but thanks to ever-shorter innovation cycles, many devices are disposed of after a few years or months." So while information technology makes more plausible achieving the promise of sustainability in business, it also adds significantly to the challenges for the systems innovator.
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