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Dell and Nokia the Most Green (Tech) Companies
da_matta writes "Greenpeace has ranked top electronics companies on their attitudes towards ecology. In addition to what toxic materials are used in manufacturing, the report on "greeness", for example, considers how the recycling of old products is handled and how ecological issues are considered in company processes and decisions. Idea is that the ranking is updated quarterly, and companies would like achieve to the top position. Dell and Nokia take the top position with a rating of 7/10, with Apple, Acer, Motorola and Lenovo falling behind with ratings worse than 3/10."
Something interesting about tech companies is that concern for the environment is something that comes in usually later in the company's lifetime--after they've become millionaires. Because being green is, unfortunately, usually more expensive than the alternative.
... but you're not even sure how many of these will be made and the market's not looking so good and you just want to start turning a profit. Plus you have all the other guys to compete with and they don't have any sort of thing like this nor does the government demand it.
Let's say you're making computer monitors in the early 90s and you start developing prototypes. You produce a 19" model that works well. Now, you could sink more money into the project and try to think of alterations to the design so that the chemicals inside the cathode ray tube can be safely removed before disposal
Now it's ten years later and you're well off as a company selling tens of thousands of units each year. And you get a letter saying that because your product contains harmful chemicals, you've scored low in some newspaper rating for green companies. Plus, you want to tap the hippie market and score more profits. What do you have to do to make your product 'green'? Well, what would have been a design change in the beginning is no longer possible. Not only do you have to do that but you have to change all your manufacturing plants and work out the new source for the changes in these products. Plus you've got all that inventory and raw materials sitting around waiting to be made into new monitors. Well, it just doesn't seem worth it anymore. Even if you offer dismantling them as a service, you'll have to charge nearly as much as the monitor costs--is this even realistic?
The sad fact is that (most of the time) green products need to start out as green otherwise there's a very good chance their success will allow their manufacturers to overlook the benefits from being a green product. It needs to be a design time concern. Computers have valuable metals in them--can you see an easy way of extracting these? It's a pretty complicated process right now and I don't think it's very efficient. Nobody seems concerned with asking themselves where the product goes when it's done because initially they're not afraid of making an environmental impact. But if all companies have this shortsightedness then we're bound to suffer. As good little consumers, we buy the best product (hail capitalism) and we evaluate the products based on commonly held beliefs about quality and service. Unfortunately, we lack the foresight to imagine what we do with the product when it's (usually short) life span is over.
When your CD player breaks, what do you do with it? In the old days, if a phonograph broke, you took it to a skilled craftsman who fixed it. Today we throw things away and just buy a new one constantly. This is because the labor involved with fixing the old unit is more costly than a new unit. In doing this, we really build up staggering amounts of trash--the EPA estimates that U.S. citizens generate 4.6 lbs of trash per day. Doesn't this seem like something that is going to become a logistical nightmare?
My work here is dung.
In 12/2005, my still-under-warranty iPod was gathering bad sectors on the drive. The "genius" at the Apple store said bad sectors were normal, and to just reformat it. After being quite persistent, he relented and gave me a replacement. But not before charging me a $30 "recycling fee". Bullshit! Given that they'll use all the parts, save for maybe the battery, again, I find it quite hard to believe that the battery costs $30 to recycle. FWIW, the way out of this fee is to purchase the Apple extended service plan. And then go back the next day and return just the service plan.
I know there's more to being green than just recycling batteries and parts, but Apple should be put under a microscope to make sure the money they're collecting for "recycling" is placed directly into "green" programs.
Since when are those "yahoos at Greenpeace" idiot extremist eco-terrorists? I reckon the companies ranking badly in this Green Electronics Guide are the eco-terrorists. And better sources of information? Link one :)
Dell and Nokia? Ah ah ah! This is a joke. Since Nokia started producing cell-phones it also produced mountains of batteries. Dell has only recently taken measures to recycle PCs and make them greener. As far as I know Dell doesn't take back its old junk. It doesn't even take back computers left on lease for 3 years! I say something's fishy like maybe Greenpeace got cheaper price on Dell laptops and Nokia GSMs.
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Sorry no clever signature. If you find one I can use, the beer's on me.
I recently purchased a monitor from Dell. It came in three boxes. One was the monitor itself, the second was a power cord, which, I suppose is semi-justifiable because that will be the part which changes depending on teritory, but the third was a 30-page product manual (printed in 12 languages, of course). It's this kind of lazy packaging that really makes me doubt the thoroughness of Greenpeace's research into Dell's stance on the environment.
The company I work for buys all their PCs from Dell, and the amount of packaging that is unrecyclable that we have to dispose of is just disgusting. Dell might practice some green policies, but they pass a lot of their responsibility for the environment on to their consumers. I'd really like to see fewer plastics and polystyrene used to package their hardware.