The realities of green computing

Along those lines, HP has reduced the number of types of plastics it uses in products from hundreds to just five and has developed a printer pre-prototype made from corn-starch plastic, which degrades naturally and so could just be tossed on the backyard compost heap when it's time to buy a new one. HP engineers have made seven of the printers, which have been taken out on tours. It's considered to be in the "pre" stage, though, because "it's not feasible on a global level at the moment," McIntyre says. "We sent it to Singapore and it melted, it couldn't withstand the heat."

Which raises the "meanwhile" issue: "How do we handle today's environment and how is that ultimately affected four, five, six, seven years down the line when we're hopefully in a world that has much more green IT equipment," asks Chris Adam, director, NextPhase Services, the asset management services division of Converge Global Trading Exchange in Peabody, Massachusetts.

"We have a gap going on that is just now starting to be created through the green manufacturing initiatives ... to get those green IT assets out there into the field, but in the meantime we still have all this other stuff that is out there in the field or sitting in storerooms waiting for someone to figure out what is the best way to dispose of it," he says.

That's where asset management companies like NextPhase come in, providing planning, data security, remarketing and recycling services -- the range of "asset disposal." NextPhase keeps up with regulations such as WEEE and tracks what is going on in the U.S., where a lack of federal legislation means that states are dealing with e-waste and related issues individually. Maine, California, Maryland, Washington, Minnesota, Texas, Oregon and Connecticut have passed e-waste laws that are in various phases of implementation.

"It doesn't lend itself to a consistent platform," to take that sort of piecemeal approach since the laws all vary, says Adam.

Even so, end users -- both businesses and households -- are increasingly demanding that the e-waste problem be dealt with and that vendors produce more environmentally friendly products, while making it easier to dispose of old ones. "Many [enterprises] in the last year to year and a half have developed a heightened sense of consciousness and a heightened sense of doing the right thing," when it comes to disposing of electronics, he says.

However, as Adam notes, "until they make a biodegradable plastic or a biodegradable PC board," the balance still tilts toward e-waste as a global problem. "It's all around education as far as understanding how much material is still out there. As far as I'm concerned, we have just seen the tip of the iceberg." The forecast, he says, is that 1 billion "assets," or individual pieces of electronics -- monitors, PCs, printers, cell phones, personal digital assistants, etcetera -- will have to be disposed of in the next five years.

Companies talk about their goals to reduce per unit emissions, to cut the greenhouse gases they emit, to be more energy efficient in their own offices and also in manufacturing, but those goals have to be seen in the context of the entire corporation's mission, analyst Kay points out. Of course, not a one of them intends to sell fewer products. That means that even when they meet lofty emission reduction goals and make advances in green manufacturing, they will still have an overall greater environmental footprint in 2010, which is a target date many set for such goals, than this year.

"It's less than it would have been, but it's not as little as it would be if they sold fewer units," Kay says. Besides that, though, the truth of the matter is that "the underlying cost of all environmental damage is over population," and that's the topic no one wants to tackle, and it is indicative of the limits of what can be accomplished by even the most economically friendly IT companies. "It really has to do with the impact of humans on the environment and people are really reluctant to look closely at that because they want to think you can have it all. But you can't have it all," he says. "We're not being very wise as a species."