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Green Tech Media

Greenpeace might have waited about a month, and saved itself the paint.

It was in late August that Greenpeace trespassed on Hewlett Packard’s Palo Alto, Calif.-headquarters to paint the words “hazardous product” on the roof – an attack on HP’s failure to meet deadlines to reduce polychlorinated biphenyls (PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) in their products.

What Greenpeace didn’t know was that HP was about to come out with a nearly BFR and PVC-free notebook, the ProBook 5310m, which launched in mid-September.

That’s one big reason that Greenpeace upped HPs store on its Guide to Greener Electronics report released Friday. Now Greenpeace is applauding HP for pushing the rest of the industry on a similar course.

Check out this article from the Green Tech Media team, it’s an interesting read and got me thinking again about the green message both in terms of green IT and recycling of devices. It’s a worthy conversation to be having, and I’d love to see the vendors (AND END USERS) see what we can do to achieve more?  Could we not have more trade-in schemes, easier recycling on a local basis, but with less of the nonsense? By that I mean, I have a set of headphones with one broken earphone, who do I send them to? If it’s an iPod I can send it to Apple, to my local recycling place, phone up and ask about a mouse, a computer speaker set, power cables or headphones, and you get a bit less of a response.

• We need to make it outrageously easy to recycle your computer and all your electronic devices
• We need to encourage users to recycle their old computers rather than collect them (I’m guilty of this), stop the legacy IT collecting let us recycle/re-use, and let us reduce the life span of computers. There is no reason why we’re keeping 10 year old pcs and using them, from a support and an energy efficiency standpoint.
• We need to be more encouraging to the vendors and highlight where they’re making progress
• We need to start looking as difficult as it is at applications/roles/services – on a very simple level for example – Bank ATM’s – can they not be flatscreen, low power footprint with the facility to automatically turn off when not required? Before we start looking at PUE values, can we not evangelize the basics, switch off the lights, switch off the pc, end standby tv’s and look at how we can not only integrate this into our products, but to end user best practice?
• Now for the emotional statement. Retrospective recycling – can we have someone visit those countries, those organizations and enterprises with their legacy working and broken technology, recycle and deploy new technology? Will it cost money? Absolutely, but think of the revenues created, the opportunities created with new technologies, and the environmental benefit of collecting all those 286s and older sitting around the developing world, which might not be useable or in use.
• Can we start transforming the green IT message throughout the business into the nature of how we do business, video conferencing, solar power where possible, recycling paper and everything else, can we look at our processes and see how we can do more with less, reduce our environmental impact, reduce our cost and improve revenues.

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