Diamond Mining: Environmental Costs

       Diamond is the most valuable and the hardest stone on earth, it is not only used for beauty but for many utilities. Diamonds are not only cut for Jewelry, but it is also used for cutting tools like saw blades and drills because of their extremely hard and durable nature. Diamonds are extracted from earth with a cost, often this cost is environmental and sometimes the cost is human blood!

Destruction Caused by Diamond Mining

The environmental destruction is inevitable when it comes to diamond mining even if the mines were managed and taken care of. Diamond mines like most mines are open pit mines, thus requiring the digging of thousands of square meters of land. Some diamond mining operations are done on the beach or off shore, this will mean that large quantities of sand and rocks are removed and dumped else where. This also means that some coral reefs will be damaged or totally destructed by these mining operations. Given that most diamond mining operations are done in countries of the third world, and mostly in Africa, this means that there is little care for the environmental effects of mining, where the problem is that the environmental impact is not limited to the mining area. 

Role of Governments in Reducing the Damage

In many African countries that are rich in diamond reserves are very poor in the enforcement of mining laws, open pits are left once all the diamond is extracted allowing the excavated dirt to be blown by the winds to farmlands and rivers. In other countries where mining is regulated by strict laws that force the mining company to restore the lands that were strip mined, sometimes these programs promise to fill the excavated land and replant it with native foliage. Nevertheless, such programs are not successful because it takes decades for an ecosystem to restore as often times many animals that play vital role in the process of such restoration. Therefore, the environmental impact is catastrophic even with the filling of the pit and planting the land.

Diamond Means Blood

In addition to the environmental impact, diamond is often responsible for the death of many human lives. As in unstable corrupted countries in Africa, diamond extracted from the land is often sold and the revenues help funding militias in buying weapons, this means that diamond extraction means killing people!. We as diamond consumers must be aware of this aspect too. I'd recommend trying to make sure from where the diamond you are buying is extracted from. However, it is best to stop buying diamond as in corrupted countries it is often easy to bribe people responsible for tracking diamond sources.

Finally, as diamond has many uses in industrial uses and looks exceptionally wonderful in jewelry. It is hard to find diamond that is not stained with blood or devastating environmental impact. We need to be aware of the diamond impact, and we need to force governments to ensure diamond sources that are harmless to humans and environment.

PC Power Consumption Normal vs Sleep Modes

               I've always wondered about the difference between the power consumption of my PC when it is idle and when it is in sleep mode. Well I found out that a PC on idle state consumes between 70 - 200 watts depending on many variables like CPU type, Mother board, number of hard drives mounted, size and type of a the screen connected to this desktop computer.

Whereas, a computer on its sleep mode will consume no more than 2-8 watts!. This is roughly about 4% of power consumption!. This is a very good thing, but what is the use of these numbers?

It is very simple, when you know that you are not going to use your computer for the next half an hour or more, it is better if you turn your computer to sleep mode. If you have a windows vista or more this can be easily done from the control panel  under the power saving options.

What is more astonishing is that when the computer is turned off, it will still consume up to 2 watts of energy!. Which means that your computer is consuming power for nothing!. To prevent this from happening, you can pull the main plug of the computer out of the power socket. This will ensure that your computer is not consuming any power at all.

But you might think that if the difference between turning off the computer and having it in sleep mode is not that big (a mere 2 watts in consumption) the why do I have to turn my PC off? I can keep my PC in sleep mode and there no need to turn it off.

But wait, if you disregarded the energy consumption of the PC in sleep mode you need to think about other aspects regarding this. The most important aspect is that when the computer is in sleep mode it will be already in the operating system and the RAM will still have data in it, if electricity went down for any reason then this means that the computer will lose power and this will remove all data in the memory and might lead to damaging some files related to the operating system (like the dll files that are for windows) and on the long run this will lead to failure in the performance of the operating system.

Finally, we'd like to urge you to save the environment by turning to sleep mode when you are away from your PC, but we don't recommend sleeping your computer for more than 8 hours, as this is a risky thing as the PC cord might be accidently plugged out or electricity might fall down.

If you have any thing to say please post a comment below, thank you!