Information technology includes a number of important environmental considerations. In this video, you’ll learn about material safety data sheets (MSDS) and the best practices for disposing of toxic waste, batteries, used toner cartridges, and more.
When we get a new piece of equipment or accessory, we generally take it out of the box and start using it. But there’s important documentation contained in those packing materials. If you look around, you’ll probably find a Material Safety Data Sheet or an MSDS. This is a document required by the United States Department of Labor, Occupational Safety, and Health Administration, or OSHA.
If you want more information on OSHA, you can find it on their website at OSHA.gov. You might also hear this referred to as a Safety Data Sheet or SDS. It is exactly the same thing as a material safety data sheet. There’s just different names that we use depending on where you are in the world.
This document provides you with all of the hazard and safety information associated with this product. So any products that have hazardous materials such as toner cartridges, ink cartridges, or batteries are all subject to these material safety data sheets.
You’ll see that a great deal of information is included on this MSDS, including the company and product information, for example, the toner cartridge and who made it; the composition and ingredients of that particular product; any hazard information; first aid measures; firefighting measures; and so on. Anything regarding the health and safety of the people using this product is documented in this material safety data sheet.
We use a lot of batteries in IT, not just the batteries that we have for our laptops and mobile devices, but we also have a lot of batteries that we use inside of our Uninterruptible Power Supplies or our UPS. There might be one or many of these battery types inside of those UPS systems.
And of course, we need to understand how to properly dispose of all of these batteries. The same thing applies for the toner cartridges that we use in our printers. We need to dispose of these properly. And in many cases, the printer manufacturer has a recycle program, and they include a return label in the box with the toner. That’s not the case with every toner cartridge.
And you may find that some local office supply houses will provide you with a discount if you bring in used toner cartridges. If you’re not able to recycle or trade in these cartridges for a discount, you might want to refer back to your material safety data sheet to determine the best way to dispose of these toner cartridges.
You should certainly not throw away batteries and toner in your normal garbage. You should always dispose of hazardous materials at the proper location near you.
We also have to think about the environment that we have inside of our work areas, specifically room control for temperature. All of these powered devices create heat in the memory and the CPU of these systems, so we need to make sure that we have the proper cooling so that they work at an optimal temperature.
The same thing applies for humidity. Although we can minimize electrostatic discharge by having high humidity levels, that also makes your work area bit uncomfortable. We need to find the right balance between temperature and humidity level. But if you keep the humidity at about 50%, that’s a good number to strive to.
And of course, if we’re cleaning out dusty computers and printers with a lot of paper inside of it, then we’ll want to have proper ventilation in our work area. But if you’re working with very dusty systems, you may want to make sure that you’re using a vacuum if it’s inside of the building, and it may be more appropriate to take the computer outside of the building to use compressed air to clean out all of that dust.
We often think of a UPS as a single unit that sits under our desk or it slides into a rack. But in an entire building, a UPS can be quite large, an entire room full of nothing but batteries. It’s important to know how to manage, maintain, and keep all of these systems up to date and running well. We have to use these UPS systems for our backup power in case we lose main power to our facility. And of course, if you have undervoltage events or power surges, your UPS can help protect you against those as well.
You may be using a standby UPS that switches over from regular power to the battery source. There’s usually a small delay during that switching time frame. You might be using a line interactive UPS. So as you lose voltage on the main line, your battery begins to provide additional power. Or perhaps you have an online UPS where you’re always running from the battery and the main power is simply there to continue to charge all of those batteries.
The UPS, of course, is providing more than simply power for your computer. It may have features that provide auto shutdown when you’re not anywhere nearby. You may be able to get different sizes of UPS to provide different capacities of power. The number of outlets on the UPS can also be customized so you get a system that can support many different units. And phone line and ethernet power suppression is often built into a number of these uninterruptible power supplies.
If you don’t need standby power but you would like to make sure that you’re using the cleanest power possible, you might want to install a surge suppressor. During the day, your power voltage goes up and down. There are spikes and noise on the line. And occasionally, there will be a storm that adds additional noise to the power source.
A surge suppressor will notice these spikes occurring and will take any excess voltage and redirect it to the ground. Many surge suppressors also include noise filters to remove noise from the electrical line. And they work by filtering a certain decibel level of noise at a specified frequency. This means the surge suppressor with a higher decibel rating will be able to filter more line noise.
We also have to think about how the surge suppressor will handle spikes. If you get a large amount of voltage at one time, you can absorb that surge, and most suppressors will tell you just how many joules they’re able to suppress. 200 joules is good, 400 is better, but the best suppressors are over 600 joules of spike suppression.
Along the same lines, there is a surge amp rating associated with these suppressors. If you get a higher amp rating, it’s a better quality suppressor. And another good specification to look for on your surge suppressor is a UL 1449 voltage let-through rating. You’ll see suppressors rated at 500, 400 and 330 volts. And the lower you get with these values, the better quality suppressor.