Is it more environmentally friendly to use laptops or desktop PCs?

Question

I've often wondered whether it's more environmentally friendly to use a desktop or a laptop.

To compare purely the electricity usage, I can of course calculate how long I leave my computer turned on, measure the electricity usage with a meter, convert the kilowatt hours to metric tons of CO₂ pollution depending on my power company or source of power (my power company's website's calculator indicates about 3000 kWh makes a metric ton of CO₂ emissions). Desktops are clearly worse for the environment in this respect.

But there are other factors to consider, and I'm not sure how to compare them to the electricity cost. For example:

• There are a lot of harmful and unjust mining practices involved in building a computer to get rare metals - is this impact greater for a desktop or a laptop?
• Laptops have batteries, which are bad for the environment.
• But desktops have more mass, and electronic waste is bad for the environment.

There may be specific situations where computers can be built from parts, often that people give away, which mitigates some of these concerns. But I don't know how to compare the environmental cost of production of any extra desktop parts / laptops that I have to buy against the difference in electricity usage. Does anyone have any insights into how to do this analysis, or can anyone point to any studies that have been done? Let's assume that the computer will get recycled at the end of its life (I don't know enough about electronics recycling to know whether there will still be any harmful materials left though).

Answer 1

"To compare purely the electricity usage ... Desktops are clearly worse for the environment in this respect." — That certainly used to be the case, and still often is, but only because people buy/build systems that are overpowered.

In 2019 it is possible to build a 'serious' desktop system that consumes very little power — provided you don't play the sort of games that have ridiculously high hardware/power requirements.

Passively-cooled cases, sensible CPU selection, solid state drives and integrated graphics (or efficient dGPUs) allow desktops to be constructed that consume very little power when in 'light duty' mode (i.e. most of the time), but can still deliver the goods when you need them to.

By way of example: The system I am using is currently consuming only ~30W — and that includes a 27" display. If I put all 6 cores/12 threads under 100% load (e.g. a fluid simulation), it only goes up to ~70W. If I artificially-stress it and flat-line the dGPU as well — something that never, ever happens in the real world, total power draw still only reaches ~140W. That's it. It's simply impossible to draw any more power in this system. The system that it replaced (built in 2011) idled at ~110W and flat-lined at ~450W. The new system out-performs the old one in every single way imaginable — and consumes only one-third the power.

My point is that — with a bit of thought — it is possible to build a desktop system that has 'typical' power consumption figures similar to those of laptops, whilst having power-on-demand for those times you really need it, and enjoying all of the other — life-extending — advantages (e.g. repairs, upgrades) that come with being a desktop.

Once you get desktop power consumption down, the components (and thus environmental cost) are roughly comparable between the two. At that point the most important factor becomes the lifespan of the device — how long until you need to replace it. That's a battle laptops lose by a country mile.

From a sustainability point-of-view, building an energy-efficient desktop system — that is correctly specced ('right-sized'), and can be repaired and upgraded to greatly extend its service life — is by far and away the best approach.

Answer 2

To add some numbers to the discussion, I found

• a white paper from Fujitsu about a desktop (2018)

  • production energy usage: 6.8 GJ or 450 kg CO2 equivalent
  • use phase energy usage: 9.2 GJ or 30 - 500 kg CO2 equivalent (Norwegian vs. German electricity mix)
  • usage scenario: 5 years
    TODO: find out h per day or similar.

• LCA of an Ecolabeled Notebook (2011)

  • use phase energy usage: 0.15 GJ over lifetime (corresponds to 10 W avg. power when on)
  • use model: 4 years office (but not as replacement for desktop: only 2.3 h on/working day), 2 years private use (5 h on/day).
  • Side note: personally, I buy office laptops that are 3 or 4 years old, possibly update/upgrade some parts (SSD, RAM). The last one lasted another ≈ 5 years until hardware failure (current one is still "new").

• Dell Latitude E6400 (2010)

  • 4 years
  • total 320 kg CO2 equivalent, 160 production + 30 transport to customer, 160 use (EU mix). - 30 for recycling.

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In any case, production energy usage is a substantial part of lifetime energy usage (both laptop and desktop). Thus enhancing life time, i.e. use as long as possible, is typically a good idea.
Note: with 50 : 50 energy usage in production and over assumed life time, if that computer is used twice as long, then a hypothetical replacement computer requiring the same amount of resources for production would need to use zero energy during usage in order to not need more energy in total.

• salvage parts (laptop + desktop):
  e.g. old laptop HDD + external case => my cloud server storage (for RasPi)

• some upgrades may do a lot for lasting usability and reducing power consumption.
  Example: upgrading HDD -> HDD + SSD (both for laptop and desktop) for me had 2 results:

  • increased speed (primary reason) => adding years to usable life time
  • HDD maybe needed only 1-2 times per day, most work takes place on SSD => lower power consumption

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Some guesstimates:

There are a lot of harmful and unjust mining practices involved in building a computer to get rare metals - is this impact greater for a desktop or a laptop?

If comparing a "plain" office desktop (no particular fancy extra graphics card) with some case, power supply, mainboard, RAM, HDD, SSD, monitor, keyboard and mouse with a laptop:

• the desktop system may contain a bit more electronics (due to less integration with the periphery devices), but it's probably not that much.
• but this modular building principle means that most of these parts can be used until they (each single part) fail: failed parts can either be replaced or leftover parts used with another system easily (because they are normed across manufacturers).
  This is also the case for some of the laptop parts (SSD, HDD), but not for others (monitor, mainboard, keyboard, touchpad).

Laptops have batteries, which are bad for the environment.

• Batteries don't last that long. As I use the laptop to work on trains etc. I may buy replacement batteries. If you use the laptop as desktop replacement, at least the replacement batteries are not necessary.

But desktops have more mass, and electronic waste is bad for the environment.

• I don't think they contain that much more electronics. Most of the increased mass is steel case and frames. They are not that much of a concern environmentally: they last approximately forever (and have normed form factors since decades), so can easily be directly reused. If not, steel recycling is established and much easier than properly dealing with electronic waste.
  Also heavier power supply - but that may be overall more environmentally friendly if more efficient (?)

have to leave now, hope to finish this over the weekend.

Answer 3

Desktops hands down:

1. Materials used Aside from form factor, almost all of the components of a laptop could be plugged into a desktop and function as is. With that in mind however, laptop components are designed to be more power efficient and to be space saving whereas desktop components provide more 'power' for using the same amount of raw material; when considering that the energy usage is not worth mentioning when talking about RAM etc there isn't much of a difference aside from desktop components being significantly cheaper. You mentioned mass, desktops usually use steel frames which are almost 100% recyclable whereas the average laptop is made from plastics (PET, ABS etc) which are rarely recyled. Only concern with weight is transport but this is offset by the reduced need for raw materials.

2. Re-Use and Recycling Laptop parts tend to live short lives owing to their high case temperatures (especially when most owners don't remove dust from their fans!) they are also significantly harder to re-use as most are proprietary (sizes, interfacings etc) and are often non even compatible with the same brand (Hard drives etc are an exception) whereas desktop parts can be chopped and changed as much as you have the effort for; you are right in saying that you can build 'graveyard' systems from old parts with many people building gaming PC's from parts that are on sale. Components from both types are recycled the same way however which is difficult to do (low profit and dirty work, often out-sourced to less developed countries as a cottage industry).

3. Batteries I'll be brief, new and in-development battery technologies use virtually no rare, toxic or otherwise noteworthy materials. Lithium is in good supply, the only worry is being able to produce it at a fast-enough rate with electric cars using it all up.

4. Energy Usage The reason I saw this is inconsequential is that the difference between power used is prettymuch pocket change unless you're running some beefy gaming computer or crypto miner, remember that batteries are never 100% efficient leading to a large amount of waste heat. With more and more sustainable sources of energy being made available the usage of a low-end computer (laptop or desktop) is simply not worth considering.

As for disposing of computers, re-use is always better than recycle: Sell it>Free on Gumtree etc or Donate it to schools etc>Scrap it yourself and sell the parts (PSUs sell well)>Depending on the facility they often just remove large components (PSU, case) and mulch all the rest (mainly PCBs) and extract all the metals used, the only value in a silicon chip is the design and assembly

Answer 4

Since a few years have passed, I think my original question has a better answer: mini PCs are better than either laptops or desktops. These are as low-power as laptops, or lower, while avoiding the battery and using fewer materials. If you don't play games and don't need portability, they seem like the current most environmentally friendly choice.

Answer 5

My opinion is that it's most environmentally friendly to buy a good laptop, but use it mostly as a desktop.

Manufacturing electronics creates surprisingly much emissions. There's a Finnish calculator to calculate your environmental footprint (called climate diet), and it seems to use a factor of about 0.87 kilograms of CO₂ for every euro spent in electronics.

For a computer costing 1000 EUR, and having a lifetime of 4 years, the yearly manufacturing emissions are 217 kg CO₂.

The lifetime of a laptop is mostly defined by:

• Lifetime of its battery and fan, if the laptop is so cheap it isn't economically viable to repair a broken battery or fan -- if you buy a good laptop with long expected lifetime, you are more likely to pay to have it repaired
• Lifetime of its keyboard, this isn't usually feasible to repair since there are so many keys that might need repair
• The amount of time the CPU, storage space and amount of RAM stay competitive

So, by buying a laptop with powerful CPU, enough space for SO-DIMM memory including future expansion and enough possibilities for installing big storage (preferably at least one M.2 SSD slot and one SATA 2.5" HDD/SSD slot), you can use the laptop about as long as you would use a desktop. It's true that laptop CPU cannot be upgraded, but even with a desktop upgrading a CPU often means upgrading the motherboard, which also means upgrading the RAM since maybe the old motherboard used DDR3 and the new uses DDR4. So, I don't really think that laptops would automatically have a lower lifetime than desktops, assuming the keyboard doesn't degrade, and assuming you are willing to pay for battery and fan repairs.

What you can achieve by using the laptop as a desktop is maximizing the lifetime of its keyboard. You also make it more ergonomical since displays can be set at proper height and you have a big keyboard and a real mouse.

The benefits of not buying a desktop and using a laptop instead are many:

1. You don't need to purchase a separate UPS for power outages, and remember, every euro spent in electronics creates 0.87 kilograms of CO₂, so that's clear savings. Also the built-in "UPS" of a laptop has far longer storage duration than most lead-acid battery based UPSes.
2. If you ever need a laptop, with a desktop computer you would have to buy a separate laptop computer (and every euro spent in electronics creates 0.87 kg CO₂), whereas if your desktop is a laptop, you just unhook it and use it elsewhere
3. Laptops consume far less power. A desktop may use 100 watts excluding the display, which would be between 292 and 877 kWh per year (depending on whether you keep it always on or put it to sleep mode during night and use only 8 hours per day). At 0.4 kg/kWh emissions of natural gas generation, that's 117 - 351 kg CO₂ per year. However, a laptop would use maybe 10 watts, that's then 12 - 35 kg CO₂ emissions per year. Even in the relatively clean electricity grid of Finland (0.1 kg/kWh), desktop could create as much as 88 kg CO₂ per year (if you don't use the sleep mode), whereas a laptop would create tenth of that. Although it's true that in clean grids electricity use doesn't matter that much (because manufacturing the computer in China created so much more emissions than using the computer in a clean grid), it's still some clear savings.
4. Laptops are better during extended power outages like what they have in Ukraine now. They use so little power it may be realistic to use a laptop from a power station that is charged by solar panels. And during winter if solar energy is unavailable, it's possible to run a generator for a very short time, rapidly charging a power station, and then use the laptop from a power station for a duration of a week, that was charged with only 0.5 liters of gasoline. A desktop would need ten times the amount of gasoline if charging the same power station with gasoline.

Of course, an external display costing 250 EUR (one-time 218 kg CO₂) and using 30 watts (35 kg CO₂ per year at 0.4 kg/kWh and 8 hours per day) will have some emissions drawbacks. However, if with the use of an external display you can extend the lifetime of your laptop keyboard from 2 years to 6 years (or actually the laptop keyboard would last forever then due to non-use but the rest of the laptop might have a lifetime of 6 years), you save 290 kg CO₂ per year. If the display has a lifetime of 6 years too, that's yearly CO₂ footprint of 36 kg from manufacturing plus 35 kg from usage, which is 71 kg per year total. Even though the external display created some emissions in manufacturing and consumes more power, the fact that it allows you to use an external keyboard more than offsets all created emissions. (Well yes, theoretically someone could hook an external keyboard to a laptop while still using the built-in display, but that's just weird).

My estimate that a laptop keyboard degrades in 2 years to the point it's no longer usable is based on experience using a laptop without external monitor as my main computer for a period of a year. The keyboard showed so much degradation that I could maybe expect a second year out of it, but not more. (After that year of using a laptop as a laptop, I bought a display and used it as a desktop from that point on.)