It's good to be Green

PC manufacturers and Global warming

A few weeks ago, Former Vice President Al Gore testified in front of Congress telling them that the world faces "a true planetary emergency" unless it dramatically and immediately reduces emissions that most scientists tie to global warming.

One industry that's making a particularly large environmental impact, is the PC manufacturing industry. As small as today's PCs are, the amount of resources that are required to produce a PC, including the costs of any toxic wastes that are produced as a byproduct, and runtime costs are getting larger and larger. The amount of power required to keep YouTube or Google alive is astronomical.

What is Green Computing?

Instead of focusing on the the traditional bottom line economics of a computing solution, Green computing is about incorporating the social and environmental impact of a computing solution. This means being responsible for each step of your products lifecycle, which I've separated into three simple steps: Creation, Runtime, and Cleanup.

Creation: Minimize the waste generated by the production process.
Runtime: Maximize the energy efficiency of the product's runtime.
Cleanup: Manufacturers should ask themselves two questions:

1. Are the wastes generated by our production process recyclable?
   
2. How easy are we making it for our customers to recycle their hardware?

Greenpeace Ranking

Every year, Greenpeace produces the Green Electronics Guide which ranks leading mobile and PC manufacturers on their global policies and practice on eliminating harmful chemicals. This guide also considers how much responsibility the company takes on once the products are discarded by consumers. Factors such as promoting consumer recycling and the phasing out of toxic chemicals are considered.

A partial list follows. Companies are ranked between 1 and 10, where 10 is the best and 1 is abysmal:

1. 8 - Lenovo. The brand formerly known as the IBM Thinkpad line, is at the lead with the most improvement over the last two years. Lenovo is based in China.
2. 7 - Dell. Looks like the latest line of hardware by the Texas based PC manufacturer is also in the lead
   
3. 4 - Sony. Their inconsistent take back policy results is a low ranking for the makers of the PlayStation 3 and PSP
   
4. 2.7 - Apple. Rounding out the bottom of the list is Apple. It turns out that Apple withholds the full list of regulated substances and still uses Tetrabromobisphenol (TBBA), a fire retardant extremely poisonous to water organisms.
   

What are you going to do about?

"What am I going to do about it? I don't make the products, why should I care?"

Yes, but you purchase them. And if Apple's recent press release about selling 100 million iPods is any indication, you buy lots of them. I'm not here to convince you that PlayStations are evil or that iPods cause cancer; I can't and I won't.

What we need is to inform consumers that there are methods of manufacturing that reduce waste and harmful byproducts. Manufacturers will tell you that it will end costing you more money. Don't buy that. Costs will only be affected in the short run. If enough people become aware of the problem then innovation will find a way to reduce these environmental costs and all manufacturers will benefit from the technology.