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Greenpeace Decries Lack of Environmental Progress From Console Makers
SwiftyNifty writes with an update to Greenpeace's 2007 criticism of game console manufacturers over environmental concerns. Their claim was that some of the chemicals used to make the consoles were toxic, and that the manufacturers' recycling practices were not up to snuff. Two years have passed, and Greenpeace now says that progress is either slow or non-existent.
"... Nintendo has little plan to remove PVC and almost no plans to remove [brominated flame retardants]. Slightly further up the scale, Microsoft was again awarded a poor ranking due to the use of toxic waste materials. And Sony, who rank rather well in their mobile phone partnership with Ericsson (scoring 6.5 out of 10 for improved toxic waste and efficient energy usage) didn't perform as well in the console category, failing to eliminate PVC or BFRs from their gaming products."
Greenpeace have pulled this nonsense before. They lambasted Apple for not being "green" enough then came out and admitted they didn't really have a beef with Apple, they just went after them for the publicity as they were such a well known corporation.
Greenpeace are barely one level above PETA in the asinine self publicity stakes.
The incoherent propoganda, lies, and lack of science that Greenpeace shouts to the world does very little benefit, and very much harm to actual, real enviromental concerns.
They're as mindless, cultlike, and factually wrong as PETA.
Which is terrible and unfortunate, because they are wealthy and powerful, and if Greenpeace actually cared for the enviroment, at all, in any way, they have the capability to actually do enviromental good.
*YAWN* What was I saying?
Greenpeace cares about is more money for Greenpeace.
Just like any other multinational.
Actions speak louder than words.
people are waking up to them now, but they still have enough of an ignorant support base to keep them in stunt dollars for a while...
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
It's not like they come out with a new console every few years. Oh, wait, they do. Whatever happens to the old ones, and where will they be a few decades from now? I hope console makers make a conscious decision to do better.
Not a surprise in the least. Nothing can be fun and safe anymore.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
Maybe consoles are toxic, but I don't know for certain just from the article. I don't think I can trust Greenpeace to evaluate these things accurately given their track record as a hostile quasi-terrorist activist organization.
I'd like to get a report from the EPA or Consumer Reports. I'd even take the Sierra Club over Greenpeace, even though they have a history of less than accurate reporting of situations.
PVC is useful stuff, and there are ways to manufacture it so it is less hazardous. But Greenpeace is typically unwilling to compromise once they have made up their mind.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Where is the French Navy when you needed them!
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity....Calvin
Greenpeace is largely to blame for our current energy problems. Their vilification of nuclear power has greatly hindered its adoption (politicans are already irrationally afraid of it, because of BIMBY and "terrorists"), and their pushing of so-far dead-end technology like wind and solar has caused us to be stuck with coal and oil. If they, and the average environmentalist, had enough of a brain to understand the concept of the lesser evil, we would probably not be so worried about global warming. But, logic never stopped them from crying about things.
Now we have everyone against the rational answer to the problem, and everyone shelling out billions to try to develop what simply isn't coming. Solar and wind have been around for a very long time; short of a massive breakthrough, it is never going to be as economical as the CO2-creating alternatives. Meaning, we're stuck with them until some sort of government regulation comes along... and we all know how much THAT usually helps.
Our economy is being run into the ground by power costs, and peak oil means it will just get worse. Wind and solar are not becoming more economical, and the government's answer of taking even more money out of the system is just going to make a bad situation horrible. If global warming turns out to even be half as bad as claimed, we'll be in essentially a second dark ages.
We could have built enough nuclear plants to power the entire world, and thus avert all these problems, with the money Obama threw away; but here we are, the construction of a single plant is news-worthy.
Sometimes I wonder if it would really be so awful if humanity killed itself off. We're not really getting any better... perhaps we shouldn't go and pollute space with our stupidity.
Great Intellect...
Yeah, cuz the earth is doing just fine, and e-waste is no problem at all.
Their rating system is entirely biased and is not even remotely objective. Their admitting in the past that they will still give failing grades to some companies even if they are the greenest around just because they think it might influence them to do better. Basicaly saying regardless of how well you do you'll never be good enough.
Effectively they invalidated the entire program of rating companies meaningless. You cant hold everyone to wildly different standards and still expect to be taken seriously.
The console industry works on five year cycles with a ten year lifespan for each product, a new version turning up halfway through its lifespan.
We're currently about two and a half years in to the current cycle for the PS3, a little more for the XBox360.
So, amazingly enough, the manufacturers didn't dump their hundreds of millions of dollars of investments, six months in to their ten year lives, just because Greenpeace told them to? Why that's just crazy.
Or, alternatively, it would've been blatantly obvious to anyone with even a cursory understanding of the console industry to know there couldn't be any significant change by this point (with the exception of the PS3 slim on the horrizon) and Greenpeace are simply showboating, picking something they know can't be changed but is mainstream culture enough to draw them column inches if they attack it.
It's cheap politics like that that lead me to ask, getting daily acosted by them to save the whales, "Why? Do they make good sushi?" When they can treat me with respect and stop trying cheap manipulation, I'll return the favor.
Whenever greenpeace says anything I simply cannot beleive them because of their practice to make shit up.
It is possible that consoles are hazardous and that it is a real problem but when greenpeace says so, I simply do not beleive them. Had this come from a coherent not-making-shit-up-routinely organisation then I probably could have listened. So far though, no such organisation has spoken out.
E.g. the ROHS program, which forced manufacturers to remove lead (and other things) from their products
How many companies changed their product, midcycle, to comply before they were legally compelled to?
My guess is new product cycles may have been changed in anticipation and those that were midcycle when forced by law did so - but that no one suddenly tossed out a working design simply because they felt it was the nice thing to do.
Microsoft had their reputation trashed with the red ring of death issue. The last thing they need for the 360 is to tweak some design component that doesn't save them money, doesn't allow them to put out a cheaper product and introduce a new flaw that hammers an extra nail in their coffin of perceived reliability.
That being the case, every change to their design needs to be tested and not just tested in a few cases. They need to be absolutely certain that their new design won't warp more easily, won't overheat more easily, won't damage discs over time and thousands of other risks.
At that point, each change is hardly a cheap one for them to explore. That change is merited if they can knock more off in manufacturing costs than the new testing cost on average per unit sold (a cheaper chipset for example). That change is not merited if they save nothing but incur a huge expense in terms of either risk or testing.
So, whilst new designs, when broadscale testing is happening anyway, make financial sense to introduce changes and whilst laws will ultimately force anyone that wishes to remain in the market to make changes, my guess is very few companies ever simply risk an estabilished product line, mid cycle, simply because it's a nice thing to do*.
*unless there's a heavy marketing angle in it.
Like most things in life, the Environment is neither in danger as the radicals would have you believe or as healthy as the conservatives would have you believe. But I digress. Are game consoles really worth talking about in the grand scheme of things? I would think that figuring out how to transport people and heating homes without emitting carbon would be SLIGHTLY more relevant.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
It's interesting to see how the green propaganda machine is specifically targeting the high-tech industry. A length of drain pipe probably contains more PVC than a hundred game consoles, but you don't see Greenpeace decrying the lack of environmental progress in the plastic pipe industry. They're just preying on peoples' fear of technology.
Breeder reactors can not only extend the life of fuel substantially, but also decrease waste to almost nothing. Nothing is a permanent option, but nuclear is by far the best currently. Believe me, I've read much more on it than your average slashdotter.
Great Intellect...
Combined with whining and pouting, gaming consoles keep kids from being driven to soccer, baseball, hockey or other organized sports, thus reducing the carbon footprint. Let's make an FPS for these kids that comes with a club so that we can kill baby seals.. or a whaling harpoon, or, better yet, make us French Marines trying to blow up a GreenPeirce boat. It's important to consider that gamers generally prefer FPS. They don't give a flying fuck about how the console was made. They just want to kill... Kill... KILL!!!
NOTE: Fat kids are lazy kids and will be less and less likely to get up and go somewhere when they can sit and twiddle their fingers for self-satisfaction. As you can see, the comparative impact of some chemicals in a console is far outweighed by the reduction in emissions that result from gaming. Longer term, due to lifestyle, they will die sooner and, again, reduce their lifetime carbon footprint.
If GroanPiece were an organization that was balanced instead of being activists without a clue, I would give them credibility. Once again, they are full of shit.
*Gun - get it?!! **You might disagree if you're from Kiev!
*** Don't be dull.***
For the most part pointless, they apparently spend most of their time trying to come up with new crap in order to try and justify their existence, and are often only noticed when people mock the next stupid thing they've come up with.
And yes, I was so gutless I waited until I got home to post this, just in case someone else from the ^H^H^H ... ahhhh, you nearly got me there.
Why live at all if you're going to live by some crazy rules set down by some nuts that don't even know what the frick they're talking about? Most greenies are hippies that don't know any actually science and it's all about being nice and in tune and that kind of crap. Then you get the second layer that just do it because it's politically correct and kind of cool right now. Obviously we all need to live within limits. That doesn't mean we can't use plastic, eat meat, or actually behave as human beings have a right to act like human beings (the most successful species ever to our knowledge).
Green living isn't going to do shit for mankind. It's to late to go back - the only way left is forward. We need to use chemistry, genetics, nanotech, and all those other 'evils' to leapfrog our own path of destruction. This is just one planet - we can make others habitable if needed.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I wish that getting a 65% on a test in college would have qualified as "rather well", thought I guess electronics manufacturers get graded on a curve
There is a classification for Greenpeace: Ecoterrorists
You didn't read up on nuclear fuel either, since your entire post appears to be bullshit. I guess that's why you posted AC. Good job eh?
...that we pipe our drinking water through it.
(Though, to be fair, the water that comes out of PVC pipes does tend to have a lot of DHMO in it.)
bipartisanship, n.: when both parties gang up on you
That's true, but unfortunately we can't mod you "Batshit Insane" so we have to settle with "Troll". Seriously, if you advocate killing someone because they aren't able to attain a 0% footprint you are either batshit insane or a troll.
I want to say more, but I would only be feeding a troll or trying reason with a crazy person.
Like most people you didn't read up on Nuclear power before you posted.
Seems you didn't either...
Nuclear power isn't available in abundance.
The TOTAL amount of Nuclear fuel on this world can sustain the current energy hunger for about 3-5 years.
Utter bullshit. The currently known reserves of U235 are enough to last around 80 years at current rates of consumption. Reprocessing the waste can greatly extend that, and those figures ignore reserves which haven't yet been discovered.
Those figures also ignore U238, which can be bred into Pu239. Known reserves of U238 are enough to last us tens of thousands of years.
Problem with this is that mining and processing the stuff actually cost lots of energy (and creates greenhouse gases).
Like most other power generation technologies. Did you think that mining coal took no energy?
In the short term this is a problem for most technologies. In the long term, much of the energy used for mining can come from nuclear power itself.
So a big part of the fuel will actualy cost more than it produces
Complete rubbish.
Combined with the massive amount of energy needed for building a Nuclear power station is neither green or any sort of real alternative.
Compare it to the amount of energy needed to build thousands of wind turbines, or enormous hydroelectric projects. Pretty much any large scale power generation project uses vast amounts of energy for construction - if you're going to damn nuclear on these grounds then you can damn pretty much everything else too and we'll all go back to living in caves.
It is not without reasen the government needs to put in massive amounts of money for a Nuclear station it cannot compete on costs.
Finally, a point with some truth. Yes, nuclear can't currently compete with the cost of fossil fuels. So the choice is that we either keep burning fossil fuels (potentially trashing the environment until they run out and then we'll have no choice anyway) or bite the bullet and decide that we can no longer afford to keep plugging away at the cheapest option.
(so it probably neither can on energy efficiency compared to fossil fuels)
I don't even know what you mean by this point. Efficiency of what exactly?
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Everyone pointing out that Greenpeace are stupid power-hungry jerks whose opposition to nuclear power is an environmental disaster is right.
Now they are doing it again. This time, they have been opposition to genetically modified crops, with (once more) no good scientific or environmental reason. And once again, they try to whip up public sentiment with scare stories. It worked on a bunch of europeans this round, but failed in the USA.
Ummm.... who the hell asked them?
I can agree with people's reservations against greenpeace, even though in general my sympathies are with environmental activists. However, doesn't the idea of making computers more environmentally friendly a good one? I think of the computers I've owned and probably will own, sitting in a land fill somewhere, leaching their heavy metals into the water supply. I find it plausible that industry hasn't put much effort into making our tech gadgets less toxic because there's not much pressure on them to do so and because it costs more money. Capitalism in part makes profits by depleting resources common to all. Things which are priceless essentially have no value, until they become scarce enough, in which case we start paying for air, water, top soil because there's no longer enough left.
I see you all attacking the messenger (greenpeace) without sufficiently analyzing the message. I'm all for greener computers.
Seriously, if you advocate killing someone because they aren't able to attain a 0% footprint you are either batshit insane or a troll.
Except, only someone totally unable to parse English (and thus someone who should really be ineligible to moderate) would think that's what I said. I said I might consider advocate killing people who are killing whales, though. I also said that Nokia is not Good until they have a 0% footprint. With that said: even then, they are probably still evil in the balance, although they are ecologically neutral. It's difficult to impossible to be a publicly traded company and not do evil. Unfortunately, there can be no mathematics which sets absolute values for the good or evil done by a company, due to the difficulty in drawing the line, so like any other judgment we have to narrow it down to "do I find it acceptable."
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As much as I don't agree with everything Greenpeace does, it's healthy to actually bring attention to e-waste in this country and throughout the world. It gives us all something to consider.
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