China, Mexico, and Others Would Pay More for Green PCs
by Alex Pasternack, Beijing, China on 06.27.06
How much more would you be willing to pay for a non-toxic computer? "Uh, how is a computer toxic?" you ask, "and why does it matter?." Consider the amount of PCs that will be thrown out in the U.S. over the next few years (imagine a 22-story pile of old computers covering the entire 472 square miles of the City of Los Angeles, one study estimates) and the sort of nasty stuff that goes with them (flame retardant chemicals, plastics, and heavy metals like cadmium, lead and mercury) when they get dumped in poor villages in India and China. According to a new nine-country survey (PDF summary here) conducted on behalf of Greenpeace by Ipsos-Mori, PC users in Mexico are most ready to put the green where the green is: on average, those surveyed would shell out $226 extra for an eco-PC; in China, PC users would pay $199 more. German users, on the other end of the spectrum, would be willing to pay only $58 more for an environmentally-friendly computer.
Any way you read them, the results are promising--and computer makers are already listening. Big-time recycler Dell has just promised to tackle the problem of contaminating e-waste by eliminating the use of some toxic chemicals in its products by 2009. While Greenpeace reports that other companies, including Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, have made similar commitments to get greener in the near future, still lagging behind are Acer, Fujitsu-Siemens, IBM, Lenovo, Panasonic, Siemens, Toshiba and Apple, even if it recently succumbed to pressure to institute a recycling program. Meanwhile, Greenpeace singled out Motorola as the only one of the top five cellular phone manufacturers that has failed to remove toxic chemicals from its production process, and says it has "backtracked" on environmental promises made previously.
The Greenpeace survey also shows that computer users in the Philippines would be most willing to replace their current PC with a more environmentally-friendly model, while users in China--where 4 million computers go to die every year--are most concerned about environmental aspects (such as energy consumption and the presence of toxic chemicals) when purchasing a new computer.
That may come as no surprise, since, after all, as the world's computer graveyard, China (along with India, where not enough PC users exist to conduct the survey) is awash in toxins from e-waste. As Greenpeace researchers showed last year, a whole rainbow of toxic chemicals and metals can be found in the rivers, groundwater, and indoor dusts in southern China and in districts near New Delhi where electronics are recycled. Dust samples from batter dismantling workshops in India were found to contain 8.8 percent lead by weight lead and 20 percent cadmium—a level some 40 thousand times higher than typical indoor dust samples. And, as some samples found at the sites indicate, waste is still being exported illegally from the United States (note the computer part found in China with a New York Stock Exchange logo emblazoned on its side).
Until green computers start appearing on the shelves--hopefully at premiums that aren't too high--we can pitch in by lobbying governments and computer makers to focus on making computer production and recycling more green, as groups like Computer Take Back and As You Sow are doing. As Justin noted recently, when the European Union's RoHS directive goes into effect July 1st, all electronics sold in the EU must be free of lead, mercury, and other chemicals. Meanwhile, Washington state recently passed a law requiring computer manufacturers to pay for green recycling--joining Maine, California, and Maryland in enacting e-waste legislation, which is pending in 19 other states and New York City. For some more immediate satisfaction when your PC has loaded its last Treehugger page, you can recycle your desktop or laptop through programs like Dell's or Ebay's, or find an environmentally-friendly recycler with this this handy map (U.S. only).
See also John's recent review of Elizabeth Grossman's High Tech Trash, and for a sobering (yet strangely sublime) depiction of the sheer amount of e-waste being shipped to Asia from Europe and the U.S.--and another great example of garbage-as-art--check out Beijinger Xing Danwen's striking photographs.
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Ars Technica also has a post about this:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060627-7148.html
Keep an eye out for companies late to the RoHS ball, "dumping" lead laden electronics in the US because they are not able to sell them in the EU after July 2006 unless they pay a stiff duty. "On Sale" will have an entirely new meaning in the US, since the Federal government has chosen to do virtually nothing to step up to the progressive standards set on other continents while US consumers will welcome the low prices, ignorant of the true costs that will follow.
The problem with the Modern World (that is, the pertinent one) is that we are lazy. To excuse ourselves from work or responsibility, we marginalize people calling us to action, even to voice our opinions, as some variation of "radical" that we don't need to give credence, no matter how qualified the opinion or fact. We think, rightly, that the weightier problem with computer waste is its sheer volume, and that "someone" should just tell the computer manufacturers that they need to create modular, replaceable computer parts first, so that each new obsolete model doesn't get dumped en masse. We think that "someone" should just make dangerous chemicals and heavy metals against the law and "someone" should just enforce it. We think that "someone" should not be so concerned with squeezing every last penny from their market when it means doing things that are bad for the "whole world" (read: us). And we think that that "someone" should not be us, because we are too busy making our own money. We as a culture are lazy to the point that these little toeholds on the issues are not enough, and so we reject baby steps thinking of the grander plans we'll never act on.
...PCs thrown out every year in the U.S. alone (imagine a 22-story pile of old computers covering the entire 472 square miles of the City of Los Angeles...
How much math do you need to know to see that that can't be?
Bjorn, your math instincts are right on. I fixed it: the statistic that little bit above was based on was that 315 to 600 million desk tops and laptops will be thrown out in the U.S. over the next 18 months. Seems crazy I know--kinda like the notion that we export so much toxic e-waste to Asian countries to recycle it for us.
Alex: 22 Stories. 472 square miles. Think again.
1 square mile equals 27,878,400 square feet.
472 square miles equal 13,158,604,800 square feet.
600,000,000 desktops divided by 13,158,604,800 square feet are 0.045 desktops per square foot or one old pc on every 21 square feet. Not exactly 22 stories high.
Let's say a story is what, 10 feet? 220 feet by 472 sq. miles are about 81 CUBIC KILOMETERS. (Google is handy for those kinds of calculations)
Don't know who came up with that statistic...it's repeated all over. Is that what happens when people throw out fact checking for the lazy web? But how come I could tell this statistic is two or three or four orders of magnitude off and others can't? And, why did I quit journalism school? Why? Why?
The more I look the more errors I see. In the arstechnica article they don't even quote the report correctly (check the number for Germany and Mexico) and the report itself somehow doesn't make clear that asking a Mexican how much more money on top of 500 pounds sterling he/she is willing to pay for a computer is like asking wether they want to fly first class around the world or just business.
I think for now, our main concerns should be focused on the emission of greenhouse gases. the reason for this is the fact that we can survive a world with an excess of trash, or hunks and chunks of materials we've pulled from our planet. However, taking materials and altering them for energy production releases substances into our atmosphere that ARE contributing factors to a rise in temperature, which can drastically change our climate to conditions that will not allow life to survive. The health of the earth can be protected against bulk controllable materials. we cannot contain the substances that are released during the creation of energy, and therefore we can't control them.
Of course, it would be nice if computers could be easily torn apart and put into their respective containers at the recycling center. plastic here, metal there, pcb next to metal, and cables on the left of plastic...
Willingness to Pay (WTP) survey questions (aka, a survey that asks "How much extra, if anything, would you be prepared to spend for a more environmentally friendly PC that would normally cost 500 Pounds?") have been repeatedly shown to have numerous drawbacks and frequently are not a good representation of how people behave in reality. Marketing research has gravitated away from simple willingness to pay questions to more sophisticated measures. The WTP question, as it is posed in the survey, is also strongly susceptible to Social Desirability Bias, in which respondents are more likely to answer the survey in a way that is perceived as right or good. This is especially true since many of these surveys were conducted in person. I would not say that the results are promising, but rather that they are as would be expected. Perhaps they only tell us that some cultures are more prone to social desirability bias than others. What would be more relavant would be to analyze current data, such as comparing the sales of energy-star computers to others, or to pick a few models that lean towards environmental friendliness and see how they are selling vs. competitors.