If Greenpeace’s latest Guide to Greener Electronics is to be believed, our love affair with electrical and electronic gadgetry continues to take its environmental toll. Envirowise is also concerned. According to the government-funded adviser on waste minimisation and sustainability issues, if everyone in the world consumed resources at the rate we do in the UK, we would need three planets to support us. Yet we throw away our own body weight in waste every five days.
Of course, electrical and electronic waste is a fraction of that, but it is sobering to note that, as a country, we currently dispose of 1.8 million tonnes of the stuff annually. About half of this is of domestic origin (approximately 80% of it being white goods), and despite the efforts of local authorities to set up recycling sites, smaller items are still finding their way to landfill.
Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment (WEEE) legislation, which came into force for UK manufacturers (some two years behind schedule) back in July last year is supposed to prevent our cast-off gizmos landing up in big holes in the ground.
Waste issues aside, the Greenpeace Guide takes a broader view of the manufacturing practices and products of leading consumer digital electronics producers, in addition to their attitudes to end-of-life recycling. Materials of construction, energy efficiency, energy consumed by the manufacturing process and sustainable design number among the guide’s considerations and are all taken into account when assessing a company’s overall performance.
It is essentially a scoreboard of companies’ green credentials and it ranks individual companies according to their greenhouse gas emissions, the energy efficiency of their products, the levels of ‘toxic’ materials present in their products and their willingness, or otherwise, to engage in end-of-life ‘take-back’ recycling schemes.
Greenpeace international toxics campaigner, Iza Kruszewska sees stark contrasts in the performance of companies and says that while industry ‘giants’ might pay attention to environmental performance on certain issues, they ignore others that are just as important. She cites the example of Philips, which scores well on chemicals and energy criteria, but scores ‘zero’ on e-waste, since (according to the Greenpeace research) it has no global take-back policies.
Take-back is a bit of a thorny issue and there seem to be as many schemes as there are producers. Computer manufacturers, for example, are all over the place; some have no schemes at all, while others will take back all brands for a fee (usually covering the cost of shipping) or take back their own brands and recycle in exchange for a re-purchase of that brand.
Most would like to see a straightforward take-back of own-brand products; in this way a company is motivated to make that product more easy to recycle – it’s not beyond the wit of designers. The technology is there but the business model just doesn’t stack up if you are also obliged to tackle the vagaries of poorly designed products as part of a take-back scheme.
On a scale of one to ten, this latest Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics awards the highest mark (a little over five) to Sony and Sony Ericsson. The latter is the first company to score almost top marks on all of Greenpeace’s chemical criteria, with all new Sony Ericsson models being PVC-free and (since January 2008) antimony, beryllium and phthalates free, too.
However, a score of five is only at the margins of the green end of Greenpeace’s scale, so none of the companies surveyed – all of them household names - actually attain a significant environmental ranking. Some of them (mentioning no names – just visit the Greenpeace website) have a very long way to go!
Only a company that rises to the challenge of phasing out toxic chemicals, increasing the recycling rate of e-waste, using recycled materials in new products and reducing their impact on climate change can seriously hope to make the claim of being green, says the campaigner.
Les Hunt
Editor
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