It’s a dangerous time for the green movement. It’s still a matter that deserves our urgent attention, as the extreme conditions that led to the Victorian bushfires have shown us, but as world economies suffer, the industry trend is to shy away from narratives about social culture that aren’t concerned with the bottom line. With everyone terrified about job losses and plummeting share markets, the wide scale adoption of green principles we’ve seen over the last few years may be as forgotten as last season’s fashion. So while one multinational after another tips over the brink, taking their green washing with them, it may be up to the millions of small companies toughing out the financial crisis along with individuals like us, to continue making our own industry as clean and responsible as we can.

Yet where do we start? Surprisingly, it’s easier than it looks – we’ve done the hard work for you, casting a critical eye over the tools and methods you use every day, discovering how to improve them and suggesting alternatives to consider. Simply read on…

The view from here
Let’s start with the screen you spend most of your time looking at. If you’ve joined the LCD revolution, the first thing you will have noticed (apart from not getting a hernia carrying the box) is the comparatively smaller packaging. They also emit less heat and use less power, so before you even plug it in you’ve made a difference.

Asking which one lasts longer before you have to replace though, is like asking about the length of a piece of string. Some users report that they’re still using the same CRT monitor they’ve had years, but if you’re into your graphics and colour is important (see Desktop’s May issue for our colour management feature), the electron guns that make it work start to lose strength after about two years and you’ll begin to see some false colours. Yet that doesn’t mean there’s no contest, and some LCD/LED screens still have dead pixels straight out of the box.

When your screen finally gives up the ghost, you’re then faced with a new conundrum – where is the final resting place? They’re not good for the Earth, so you can’t bury them, and disposing of them in domestic rubbish is outlawed in many parts of the world. This is because a CRT monitor contains two to two and a half kilograms of lead – up to almost 30 percent of its weight – and the liquid crystal that gives LCD its name leaching into the ground is a major new concern for environmentalists, especially with sales of LCD TVs alone more than doubling between 2005 and this year (from 40 to 100 million worldwide). So which do you choose? Here’s some food for thought.
The Toriba 18.5-inch monitor has a 16:9 aspect ratio, giving you lots of elbowroom for applications and palettes, so it’s tailor-made for high definition movies and video, with no distortion or black bars. It’s also the recipient of a silver award, and Energy Star certificates, from the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT), the assessment system for electronic products according to the international standard for environmental performance (IEEE 1680- 2006).

Dell’s 22- and 24-inch monitors take a three-pronged approach. First, they employ several power-saving techniques, like low power consumption in sleep mode and a built-in ambient light sensor that adjusts the settings to suit your surroundings. The series also does away with PVC, arsenic, mercury and other nasty chemicals from which most computer components are made. Lastly not only the packaging, but some of the products themselves, are made from recycled materials.
The Samsung P2370 reduces power consumption by reducing the number of backlights and using two thirds of the power of comparable competitors.

In the box
If you’re in design it’s a good bet you’re using a Mac, and Apple has long crowed about its green credentials. One recent initiative has been to report on the carbon emissions produced from each Apple device. The company also made a 2008 commitment to remove the toxic chemicals from its devices, moving to light-emitting diode (LED) displays to phase out arsenic and mercury, and removing PVC and brominated flame retardants from CPUs.

Yet it is wise to keep the term ‘green washing’ in mind – in mid 2007 Greenpeace rated Apple the worst of 14 contenders based on the use of toxic chemicals and a commitment to recycling obsolete products. And, if you believe some, things haven’t improved. Australian Personal Computer online reported in February this year that workers in a Sydney warehouse had been set to work to destroy palettes full of Apple equipment that was apparently in good working order with nothing more than hammers and screwdrivers for disposal in a factory skip.

Anyone with basic IT knowledge will tell you that computers draw on very little power compared to machinery with motors or heating elements like toasters and clothes dryers. For as long as the PC has existed it has had defenders who say leaving it on overnight makes little difference as it uses so little juice. Yet if all the one billion computers in use in the world (according to Gartner research in June 2008) were left on overnight, that equates to quite a bit of fossil fuel-based electricity. So without having to spend a cent on cool new green devices, or buying carbon offsets, you can make a big difference simply by turning your computer off or putting it to sleep at the end of the day.

As to where a computer ends up at the end of its life cycle, you may be inclined to think it doesn’t matter too much. Surely it’s only a little box composed of plastic and metal? Actually the chemicals found inside your machine read like a check-list for a chemical weapons plant and can include lead, mercury, hexavalent chrome, cadmium and polyvinyl chloride. Then there are the flame retardants like polybrominated biphenyls, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, hexabromocyclododecane or tetrabromobisphenol A. None of it is stuff we want seeping into our topsoil or waterways in the volumes that can result from the staggering number of old computers we throw away each year.

Consider these figures. The Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts website advises there are nine million computers in Australia, and the Eastern Metropolitan Regional Council (EMRC), a Perth-based local government body that contains six councils, advises it has received 26.2 tonnes of e-waste since it started collecting it in June last year. They also report this waste is growing at a rate three to five percent faster than general waste.

Then where should a PC’s final resting place be when you upgrade? Should you dismantle it yourself and throw it in your wheelie bin, where it will end up in landfill or on a huge pile of garbage slowly leaking toxins into the Earth? It’s probably best if you don’t. Taking your old machine to the tip for recycling, or to a council e-waste drive is much better for the planet, but ultimately most old technology ends up in developing countries, where cheap labour makes it cost-effective to strip it down – mainly because of the resale value of its parts. But remember, not all countries have the same environmental protection laws we enjoy so it’s hard to know where all our technology waste comes to rest. Everything we forge out of the Earth has to end up somewhere when we’ve finished with it.

Another consideration we don’t often address is protecting ourselves once we have dumped our old technology – don’t just empty the trash before you donate or recycle your computer, make sure you reformat the hard drive completely.

Dell has taken a lead in PC recycling. If you buy a Dell PC, when it’s delivered Dell will take away your old one and recycle it, mostly through various industrial breakdown methods that then pass the remains on down the line to plastics, metal, battery and glass recyclers. The company also holds one of the better-known programs of recycling days around the country.

A new series of high-end workstations built for industries like design, CAD and film editing, the HP Z series takes leaps ahead in power management at the chip level. Depending on the workload, the processor cores can cycle their power intake up and down, meaning it will draw much less power when idle than a comparable PC, but give you the boost you need it when crunching serious data.
In notebooks, you may want to look at the Toshiba Portégé R600, which won first place in Greenpeace’s Green Electronics Survey 2008. This program evaluates electronics for doing away with nasty poisons.

Of course, there’s an even greener solution to disposing of a computer responsibly, and that’s not using one. Everything you do on a computer is virtual and imagined, and created in arrangements of ones and zeroes – so why can’t the computer itself be ‘virtual’? Virtualisation and ‘cloud computing’ aren’t nearly mature enough to be deployed for high end graphics work just yet, but it may surprise you to learn that the technology exists to have an entire desktop – complete with applications and a virtual hard disk – that you access through a browser.

It’s also not just for geeks any more. What is claimed to be the world’s largest virtualisation kicked off recently in Brazil, with 356,800 green workstations deployed to schools. According to the press release, the ability to turn one computer into 10 virtual workstations has saved the Brazilian Government 60 percent in upfront costs and 80 percent in annual power savings, projected to save over 170,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.

From scan to print
Has paper use decreased or increased because of the internet? It would be one of the most interesting and comprehensive studies on human behaviour ever undertaken if this question could be answered on a wide enough scale. We certainly don’t produce any less paper than we have previously. As the population increases, so does our paper-based communications and information culture. With the paperless office now a ridiculous pipedream, and despite the continued growth of electronic media, we’re still very attached to using paper.

While that may sound like dire environmental news, in 2008 Desktop was assured by the Australasian Paper Industry Association that almost half the paper manufactured in Australia comes from recycled sources, with a further quarter coming from plantation or farmed timber and the rest coming from regenerated forest or sawmill residue. Unfortunately it’s not the same picture everywhere, where less enlightened governments or greedy corporations log virgin forest mercilessly for agriculture or paper pulp.

In a world where swathes of forest are thrown away on newsprint every day, little you can do at your desk will make an impact, but every little bit (from printing on both sides of the paper to buying a e-book reader for important documents rather than printing them out) helps.

Kodak has an interesting product called the ESP 5, a basic print/scan/copy device with the print heads and smart chip built into the printer instead of each new cartridge. As you’re only buying the ink instead of replacing the whole array again, they cost about half as much. While this shouldn’t prompt you to print twice as much, it means the spent cartridges contain fewer toxins when they finally get to where they’re going.

Fuji Xerox also says it’s the first in Australia to bring us a solid ink colour laser printer, the Phaser 8560. The soy-based ink technology works by impacting a simple block of wax onto the paper rather than heating toner from a plastic cartridge. The company claims 100,000 prints from a traditional printer results in 70 kilograms of waste, while its solid ink printer yields only two kilograms.

Also top marks go to Lexmark, which includes a couple of complimentary, reply-paid packets with every purchase so you can send your first spent cartridges off for recycling.

The network is the computer
At first glance communication would seem to have little to do with environmentalism, but again there’s the problem of disposal. By one estimate there are 3.3 billion mobiles in the world, 950 million sold in 2008 alone. That’s one mobile for every two human beings alive, and the numbers in the third world are as high – in many cases much higher – than they are in industrialised countries like Australia.

What’s more, phone obsolescence has an added twist. They’re objects of style as well as function, so despite the number of handsets out there still perfectly capable of making calls, the pressure to have one with all the latest tricks has more in common with fashion rather than technology marketing. That means we’ll have even more mobile devices to dispose of over time.

Where we can make a difference is at the developmental and manufacture stage. The Nokia 3110 Evolve is a fairly standard looking device, but 50 percent of its covers are made from renewable sources and the company says 80 percent can be recycled back into raw materials. The packaging is also up to 60 percent recycled and it comes with the AC-8 charger, which uses only 10 percent of standby power if you forget to unplug it.

Feeling even more conscientious? You can make the ultimate environmental statement by using a solar powered mobile. In February of this year LG announced its eco-friendly mobile phone, which looks and behaves like any other handset, but the back plate of which is made up of solar panels that power the device.

As the economy collapses, and air travel remains one of the most pollution-intensive industries we have, communication by technological means will become even more critical in our globalised world. Even more load is going to be piled on our telecommunication networks, making low-bandwidth options like Skype more attractive. With a Customer Service Guarantee (supported by the Telecommunication Industry Ombudsman), most reputable providers can offer you a very low cost VOIP alternative to your PSTN phone or switchboard, and as bandwidth increases online video technologies like webcasting and video chats will become easier.

The makers of mice, keyboards, routers and more are also getting in on the act, which gives you the option of making almost all your machinery planet-friendly. D-Link is currently shouting out about its green networking products, which incorporate energy saving technology – such as shutting down ports that aren’t in use. The company is also stripping down packaging and printing with soy inks.

Face the press
It’s hard to put a green spin on the printing industry. Literally millions of junk mail catalogues, newspapers and magazines are printed every week in Australia, many of them to be thrown in the bin unread or half read at best.

But they’re doing their best in the face of increased public concern. A typical response from the print industry is that of South Australia-based book printer, Griffin Press. “We’ve spent considerable time and cost understanding our impact on the environment,” says national sales manager, Warren Griffin. “We comply with government reporting requirements, and have also implemented an Environment Management System (EMS). We’re also offsetting some emissions and working to further reduce that footprint. An audit by Zero Waste in South Australia found we were already showing a solid commitment to sustainability, so we’re proud of that.”

Perth-based Scott Print is also moving ahead of the pack in environmentally friendly practices with the introduction of an environmental print audit. Marketing manager Rio Chard explains how it works. “In essence, we look at a client’s print purchasing to determine how to operate more efficiently and environmentally. The audit can reduce the environmental impact of the company and the efficiency can also save money. We make suggestions on changes that can be made, such as alternative stocks or changing the printing format, to make the company operate with as little environmental impact as possible.”

Lastly, digital printing still has a distance to go before it reaches the price point of a traditional press, but for work like large banners and unusual substrates, it’s already taken over. With none of the nasty chemicals, run-off or materials disposal of the four-colour web press, it’ll be a big step towards an earth-friendly printing industry.

Of course, there’s also the option to not print at all. Ever since the birth of the web there’s been a mass advance to move dense reference material away from paper, with everything from medical texts and legal proceedings to the Government’s Hansard being published and updated online. We’ve also seen a move to pdf versions of previously hallowed printed products, such as annual reports, over the last few years too.

The end of your life
Technology disposal isn’t easy. For a society so awash with gadgets, we’re surprisingly unprepared when it comes to getting rid of them. When Desktop asked a handful of vendors what initiatives they had or knew of for recycling their products at the end of the life cycle, the lacklustre response was pretty uninspiring.

The travelling recycling road shows conducted by vendors or local councils are around, but they’re few and far between, especially for outlying areas. When it comes to old computers, there’s always Green PC, which means your old systems go to a good cause as they’re refurnished and resold dirt cheap to those on the other side of the digital divide. For 30 pieces of hardware or more Green PC will collect from you, but for just a few items you will need to deliver to it, and it can’t use anything with a chip older than a Pentium IV.

There’s so much more in the toolset of a designer than there used to be in the days of drafting boards and 2B pencils. Yet that’s only because technology now allows us to control so many more aspects of the process, and that degree of control gives us a unique opportunity. Use this power – start looking critically at every step of the process and you may just save the world…