Ten countries to build a laptop? Wow - I had no idea! That is really interesting - and it will be even more interesting to see if you find a 100% local laptop...hey that sounds like a tagline for a company, eh? "100% Local Laptops!" Heehee

Unlike a large number of commodity products, laptops are not one of them. This may be true for the part of the computing public that mainly uses theirs as a terminal to access the internet and write emails. But for researchers like myself whose very work and productivity demands specific tools, this is not an option. Frankly, I don't even think it's possible to buy locally-made laptops or other electronics.

The idea of buy-local makes a ton of sense when applied to things that are massive, like food, water, building materials, etc. But for relatively lightweight objects, buying local can in fact be just as bad as buying from overseas.

Consider the fact that buying a highly manufactured item like a laptop means that raw materials had to be shipped to the point of manufacture from where they were produced. Chances are, those raw materials are not produced locally, so the vast majority of the transport-generated emissions are incurred just to get the plastic, metal, and other basic elements to the assembly point. If you happened to live near the assembly point, good, but otherwise those finished laptops would need to be shipped back to their points of sale. The only way to avoid this is to have a distributed assembly process that is vastly inefficient and totally price-incompetitive.

So save your conscience, buy the laptop you want when your old one is no longer worth using. Do the same with TVs, refrigerators, and even cars. But DO buy local foods, DON'T buy bottled water, and drive that car a little less.

Hi Anthony,

These are great points - obviously, it would be very unlikely that all the materials needed for a laptop could be found in one geographic area. So right there, that probably answers whther laptops could be made locally.

I also like your approach - just buy the one you want when you are ready. This is the miracle of price, it factors in all these items for us.

mark

I think that for some high add-value, high-tech products that require a lot of capital and R&D investments, collaboration between many countries can make a lot of sense.

It doesn't mean that we shouldn't make big efforts to reduce the eco footprint - by reducing toxic materials, energy use in manufacture, by making shipping more energy efficient - but local probably doesn't make sense until we have nanofactories that can turn a generic feed into whatever we want ;)

I've read somewhere that not all shipping distances are equal. Shipping something from Taiwan to San Francisco doesn't take a lot more energy than shipping from San Francisco to Arizona (that's just from memory - does anyone have numbers on this?).

As a commenter above has said, the first priority should be to stop shipping heavy and "dumb" products around: water, building materials, etc. All the high tech stuff probably *is* worth shipping around, because it makes a big difference in our quality of life and in how information can spread around the world (if everybody was better informed, many of our problems would be half-solved).

Very good comments. It would seem to me that there is no such thing as a local laptop...the pieces would come from allover anyway. Then we would see those somewhat misleading labels, "ASSEMBLED in the
U.S."

I agree that it seems like a pretty difficult thing to create a local laptop, but I also think that there is a lot that can be done in the design, production, and shipping side of the laptop life-cycle to make a better, more sustainable laptop.

Something that does make sense to start thinking about on a more local scale is what to do with discarded laptops and other e-waste. Shipping loads of discarded laptops to poor Asian countries where electronic products are disassembled under deplorable conditions is not a sustainable solution. I think developing the capacity to deal with this kind of waste is part of our high-tech society's responsibility. For a start, everyone should know where in their community to take their old computers for safe and ethical recycling.

unfortunately, computer components simply aren't manufactured locally. for example, apple's most expensive computer is one of the only still 'assembled' in the US, but almost every single part comes from asia.

but that other matt above me has a great point: that doesn't mean we can give up thinking about reducing our environmental impact. recycling and/or donating your computer is a good start, but I also think a huge factor is people buying new computers and gadgets when their old ones serve them just fine. If you're just using your computer to check e-mail and surf the internet, do you really need to upgrade every year or two? probably not.

I think educating people on how to fully utilize their current system for a longer period of time could significantly reduce e-waste.

Building a lot of these electronics produces some pretty nasty leftover waste too. Not what you want local.

The Soviets actually tried to compete with the West in products like integrated circuits, crt tubes, etc. and it was such a disaster that their economy never recovered. Each large company also had a mandate to separately produce a whole line of consumer products for domestic consumption, from cars to washing machines to TVs. It was a redundant catastrophe.

Most of the world's important silicon chips are made in a handful of hi-tech "fabs" and the duplication of effort for something like that would be so wasteful as to pretty much destroy the economy. Plus, integrated circuits weigh close to nothing. You can ship millions of dollars worth of product in one box.

Stick to products where shipping is a higher portion of the price, like foodstuffs, furniture, concrete, etc.