The realities of green computing

E-waste recycling and electronics being produced using fewer toxic substances and materials are hot topics right ow. But what's really happening?

More and more lately, IT vendors trumpet their electronic-waste recycling and "takeback" programs, where manufacturers accept responsibility for the full lifecycle of goods they produce. Better yet, we're told, is the rapid trend toward "green computing," with electronics being produced using fewer toxic substances and materials that cannot be recycled.

Environmental watchdog groups and academics pour out reports at an equally fierce clip regarding the global "e-waste crisis," some with horrifying accounts, complete with photos, of how electronics of all sorts from the U.S. are dumped in China, India and Africa for "recycling." Some Chinese villages have become e-waste dumping centers, where workers use hammers to beat mounds of discarded monitors and PCs into chunks that spew toxins into the air and their lungs.

Leading to the question of how much is really being accomplished given the enormity of the problem, which was widely unheard of for decades, and given that electronics makers aren't inclined to curb sales for the sake of the environment. However good their green initiatives are, there are still more PCs, monitors, cell phones, TVs and other electronics sold every year that have to be disposed of at some point, no matter what they're made of.

"One thing we need to be able to do is to separate the reality from the hype," says IT analyst Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates Inc. On one hand, companies that are out in front with environmental protection programs ought to let that message be known, and be lauded for their efforts, but on the other hand "they may be seen as opportunistic." So they ask analysts like Kay how to handle the marketing spiel. "It's not completely obvious what the right way to do it is."

The magnitude of e-waste is partly responsible for that. The Computer TakeBack Campaign, based in San Jose, California, uses U.S. Environmental Protection Agency figures to illustrate the need for everyone in the chain -- manufacturers to consumers, be they businesses or individuals -- to take responsibility. In the U.S. alone, 2.63 million tons of e-waste were generated in 2005, with more than 87 percent of that winding up in landfills or incinerators. Of the mere 330,000 tons that were "recovered" for recycling, some percentage estimated to be between 50 percent and 80 percent was shipped outside of the U.S. after being disposed of, the campaign says on its Web site.

It also bears noting that there is no such thing as totally "green" manufacturing of anything. All such processes have some effect on the environment, including burning fossil fuels to get goods from one place to another. And there will always be people who simply don't care, who are content to toss e-waste into landfills or let it be someone else's problem to deal with.

But positive changes are occurring, spurred by heightened awareness about e-waste, government initiatives -- including in the European Union, Japan and a few U.S. states -- and market forces. Companies including Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc., IBM Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Xerox Corp. -- and that is far from a complete list -- are in the vanguard and some of them have been since well before Al Gore got everyone's attention about the perils of trashing the environment. Besides using less toxic material in products and focusing on full lifecycle issues, many IT companies also have internal environmentally focused initiatives and goals, such as improving energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Kirstie McIntyre, HP's takeback compliance manager across Europe and specifically the U.K. and Ireland, has spent her 15-year-career focused on environmental issues. She spoke to issues related to e-waste and recycling from her base outside of London on a day when climate change was a hot topic because the news was dominated by widespread floods in England.

Her job is to make sure that HP is complying with regulations established in the European Union's Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive, or WEEE, which became law in February 2003, with member states given until August 2005 for implementation, though not all nations met that date.

WEEE makes equipment manufacturers responsible for disposing of e-waste generated by goods they produce, and the disposal must be ecologically friendly. The E.U. banned the use of certain toxic materials in the production of electronics, including household appliances. Those regulations are having a predictable ripple effect because electronics manufacturers aren't likely to make products for one set of countries that are composed of different materials or to fulfill different standards from those marketed in other places.

"The reason HP takes something like WEEE so seriously and the reason they've got someone like me working full time on it is that by 2010, we reckon that 75 percent of our global sales will be in countries that have some sort of WEEE directive," McIntyre says. Other large IT vendors are in the same situation.

For HP, "it wasn't really much of a stretch, it wasn't something new," to comply with WEEE, says McIntyre, adding that the company has had a "takeback" program for reclaiming, recycling and disposing of its products since 1987, with a "design for environment" program since 1992, aimed at "designing our products to be easier and therefore cheaper to recycle at the end of life."