While it's true that printing money and manufacturing coins takes a lot of resources, some have criticized Bitcoin for consuming resources unnecessarily.
that doesn't make sense to me. it takes energy to make the bitcoin system to work, and it takes energy to make the fiat system work. what do you mean by unnecessarily?
Right now, almost all mining are done by ASICs.
In the past, people used their GPUs to do the mining, which could have been used to help scientific researches just as Folding@home and Einstein@Home.