Are there different shades of 'green' in IT?

Zatni Arbi ,  Contributor ,  Jakarta   |  Mon, 09/15/2008 10:15 AM  |  Sci-Tech

I was walking around the halls of the Singapore Expo during this year's CommunicAsia in June when someone stopped me and asked me whether I would be interested in getting to know his "green" computers.

Aha! Another company that has jumped on the green bandwagon, I said to myself. Still, I followed him to his booth and listened to what he had to say.

His company built energy efficient desktop PCs and servers using components designed for notebooks. The casing was designed to provide sufficient air flow so that no fan would be necessary. The power supply consumed just enough power to drive components such as the processor and the hard disk.

So, what else was new?

At a glance, there was hardly anything else beyond energy efficiency. It showed that to this company "green" meant low power consumption. It is a great first step, but I have come across a number of other companies that claim they are making bigger strides in becoming "green".

Indeed, green is the buzzword of the year. Everything is touted as energy efficient. Less power consumed, less carbon emitted to the atmosphere -- so the theory goes. If you talk to companies like Dell, for example, you will be told that they have products for an energy efficient data center.

American Power Conversion, the world's best known power infrastructure provider, is also pushing power efficient data centers into the enterprise market.

If you talk with people from Intel Corporation, they will tell you how they have improved the cleanness of their microchips production by using hafnium-based, High-k dielectrics with metal gates, and by not using helium in the etching process.

Other computer vendors such as Acer, HP and Fujitsu each claim they also have green products on the market.

Green IT is not limited to computers; it also applies to storage. Hitachi Data Systems and its competitor, EMC, are also trying to beat each other in the race to manufacture the cleanest storage devices.

Printer makers such as HP, Epson and Canon have long sought to make their inks as environmentally friendly as possible. The boxes and the manuals have long been produced on recycled paper.

Makers of power supply units (PSUs) also have their own methods of increasing the efficiency of their products. If you look inside your computer and see "80+" on the PSU, it means that this component is 80 percent more efficient.

There is nothing wrong with striving to become green. The public has more to worry about than just energy efficient computers; they are more worried about the efficiency of their cars, for example, because the price of fuel has skyrocketed in the past few years. That's why car buyers' attention has shifted to hybrid cars or ultra-small cars that burn less gas.

Should green cover more than just energy efficiency?

"To us at Lenovo, green also means that our products are manufactured using as much recyclable material as possible," said Dion Weisler, Lenovo's vice president for the Asia-Pacific region.

Of course, energy efficiency is still a top priority. "We have joined the Climate Savers Computing Initiative and we aim to reduce the power consumption in our products by 50 percent by the year 2010," he said.

"Our commitment goes to recycle ability, too."

For example, the ThinkPad X300 -- which has just been updated to the X301 -- was one of the first notebooks to conform to this commitment.

"In addition to low power consumption, we do not use arsenic or mercury in the LCD. That is the reason it is not as bright as other models on the market, although it still has great readability," Weisler said..

Because green can mean different things to different people, there should be other benchmarks against which "greenness" can be measured. Fortunately, several new standards have emerged since the EPA's Energy Star logo started appearing on products such as CRT monitors.

Today, for example, the industry has Electronics Products Environment Assessment Tools (EPEAT). A product can have any of the three levels of EPEAT certification -- bronze, silver or gold.

"We have the largest number of EPEAT gold certified products. We have ten LCD monitors that have received the gold certificates," Weisler added.

This means that these Lenovo products have met at least 75 percent of the 44 "green" attributes.

"These include how the manufacturing plants are built and other attributes that are very hard to comply with.

"More than 80 percent of the materials used in our ThinkPads are recyclable," Weisler said.

Another certification organization is the WWF-affiliated GreenGuard Environment Institute, which focuses more on the emissions of a product.

Although there are various shades of green in "green IT", standard bodies are emerging to help consumers determine which products they should choose if they care about the future of our environment.

Still, I would prefer a single, all inclusive standard body that we can readily recognize through a label on each of the products.

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