How Green is your PC

The battle to win the hearts and minds of customers entered another round of ‘my dad is bigger than your dad’ style of marketing, as both HP and Dell announced their most recent figures on recycling in the battle to be seen as the most environmentally responsible IT organisation.
This war of marketing, or as I prefer it recycled packaging, began in 2006 when Dell announced a plant a tree for me campaign, and promptly proclaimed itself the environmental warrior of the IT community. The Dell announcement of plant a tree for me said that US$6 per desktop would fund tree planting to cover the carbon emissions the PC would generate over a typical three year life span. I calculated that using an eight hour day and 200 days operational use a year, and providing the PC is switched off when not used in the evening and weekends, then this would equate to approximately 4800 hours of use over the three years. I then used the results from the UK governments Defra report (Defra’s greenhouse gas (GHG) conversion factors for company reporting), which suggests that one should assume an average of 0.43 kg of CO2 emissions per kWh of electrical power consumption, to calculate that a standard 220 Watt PC would emit 454kg of CO2 emissions over the three years, which appears a lot for just US$6 to off set.
This announcement (plant a tree for me) irked HP who have been following a Corporate Social and Environmental Responsible (CSER) agenda, which for many years has embedded Global Citizenship as one of the seven core elements in its corporate objectives. It is also worth noting that HP has been re-cycling products since 1987; it developed the Designed for Environment (DfE) policy in 1992; and entered in to a joint initiative with the World Wildlife Fund US (WWF-US) to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions from its operating facilities worldwide in 2006.
However, the recent announcement from Dell stated it had extended its leadership in global recycling, announcing it is ahead of schedule to achieve a multi-year goal of recovering 125 million kilograms (about 275 million pounds) of computer equipment by 2009.
Not to be out done HP this week announced it recycled nearly 250 million pounds of hardware and print cartridges globally in its fiscal year 2007 – an increase of approximately 50 percent over the previous year and the equivalent of more than double the weight of the Titanic.
Therefore, as we can see this war of words, and deeds, looks set to continue, and as people become more familiar with the concept of a carbon footprint then expect this to become even more personal in how it is improving your life.
I consider that although this posturing appears targeted at convincing the consumer that the vendor has valid ‘green credentials’, and they are not contributing to the problem of green house gases, but are in fact part of the solution, it is at least driving the environmental debate and forcing other vendors to follow, which can not be a bad thing. Particularly as we are likely to witness an increased demand for even small organisations to report on its carbon emissions, and if you consider that in the example above the PC over the three years if it was not switched off at weekends and the evening would generate a total of 2500kg in CO2. Therefore, any approach to raise the awareness must be applauded if it is helping us to reduce our own carbon footprint.