Studies Have Found that Data Center Pollution is the Result of Servers that Overheat and Cause the Emissions of Toxic Gases
RIVERDALE, NJ / ACCESSWIRE / December 22, 2016 / For years, data center pollution has been the source of ongoing concern by environmental experts who worry about the quality of air and the amount of energy expended inside these facilities.
The confluence of massive amounts of heat and energy, as well as the toxicity generated by machines made from silver, which has a high sulfur content, makes data centers a source of outdoor and indoor pollution.
With the rise of social media companies such as Facebook, data center sizes and energy needs, as well as pollution, have also increased.
Because the digital age has created an insatiable need for 24/7 connectivity, communication, and networking, data centers must support a much heavier load than even a decade ago.
Sources of Wasteful Energy
A recent New York Times investigation found that many data centers consume and expend a tremendous amount of energy, and many of these facilities do so in a wasteful manner.
One of the reasons is that data centers often operate at peak capacity 24-hours a day instead of being calibrated to adjust to the varying network demands during the day.
As a result, these data centers often employ backup generators to prevent blackouts, and those generators are often powered by diesel fuel, which results in a massive amount of diesel exhaust spewing from these facilities.
You don't have to be a trained scientist to know that the quality of outdoor air - or lack thereof - has a large effect on the quality of indoor air.
That means that as data centers continue to generate toxic emissions, the outdoor air quality suffers, and much of that air will end up circulating back into the facility, requiring an air filtration strategy to ensure the safety of employees, as well as the maintenance of crucial equipment.
Other sources of wasteful energy include the commercial cooling systems that data centers require to keep their generators and their servers from overheating and triggering a power failure.
But the energy waste is also tied to air pollution, as was shown in 2010 when several of Amazon's data centers in Northern Virginia were fined for emitting diesel exhaust and failing to obtain the environmental permits to operate diesel power generators.
Indoor Contaminants
Several studies have shown that the air quality inside some data centers is compromised by gas contaminants and particulate contaminant.
Furthermore, much of the dust in data centers contains sulfur and chlorine salts that can degrade equipment such as circuit boards, which can lead to electrical shortages that can cripple an entire data center.