By Jack Williams
Information Technology greatly impacts both Health and the Environment. It helps health experts keep track of records using MIS systems. It helps doctors and laboratories come up with new, and more helpful drugs to fight sickness and disease. It helps you save paper and in turn save trees that produce oxygen for us to breathe. The list of ways IT effects the environment and Health care individually is endless. I believe that one way IT effects them both in one situation is when it comes to Recycling.
"Recycling is the process of waste for reuse: the processing of used or waste material so that it can be used again, instead of being wasted". Recycling is done in many different ways depending on what is being recycled. For example, Kimberly Clark, a paper manufacturer, takes waste paper in huge bulk, places it in huge waste paper machines,and converts all the waste into pulp. Pulp is crushed paper and wood that is used to make paper products such as toilet paper, hand wipes, paper towels, and tissue paper. This process helps save our environment by making our world and air cleaner due to recycling.
"Global warming is an increase in the world's
temperatures, believed to be caused in part by the greenhouse effect". Global warming is a huge part of our lives as it has the potential to effect us all. If global warming gets worse and worse to the point of it drastically effecting the human race, it could be devastating to the worlds population. Now we are hopefully a long way from this becoming a possibility but due to recycling and IT, we are able to stop global warming in its tracks. Technology helps and makes recycling possible by creating machinery to recycle waste, by creating new, tech savvy, products that our better for the environment like hybrid cars, and can be used to genetically modify plants and trees to allow them to grow faster and in turn, create oxygen from carbon dioxide more efficiently. This is how Technology helps our health and environment directly.
I think paperless is great. Not only does it help the environment, I think its just much easier to stay organized as well. All you have to do is look up your records either in your e-mail or on your online banking website. It helps not to lose things and you can always find something by searching.
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Zach Radmanesh
How do we know that this isn't just a vicious cycle? Much like the problem we face with eliminating paper to "save the environment," are we not headed down the same path when one day we'll find the need to save the environment by eliminating the vast amounts of servers and computing devices used to store data? And I do realize that technology is obviously improving, and with that storage size is minimizing, but at some point we're bound to face the same issues, don't you think?
ReplyDeleteI agree with Kenneth. It is great that we are saving paper. But trees can be a renewable resource. Components that are put into computers can not be returned naturally to the earth. We are currently carving open mountain tops to obtain the metals needed to create this equipment. Both methods of consuming the earths resources is damaging. I dont know which is better though.
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