Greenwash? Let's start with the screen you're looking at

It's great to have a new column exposing greenwashing. The computer industry alone could keep it filled for a year, says Charles Arthur

Charles Arthur
guardian.co.uk,
Friday October 24 2008 15.48 BST

The inevitable result of us all buyng the latest computer models Photograph: Bernard Bisson/Corbis Sygma
It is a delight to have Fred Pearce's new Greenwash column starting over on the environment site. Not just because Pearce (who I've known for about 20 years) always brings a forensic, perception-changing approach to environmental matters; but also because there're so many rich pickings for us to provide him with from the computing industry. Hell, on our own we could probably give him enough claims to fill the column for the first year.
What sort of things? Well, first of all there's the underlying assumption that chucking away your old computer or data centre in favour of something newer is going to be more "environmental". Thus Apple touted its new portable computers last week as its greenest-ever – "highly recyclable and even more energy efficient". OK, but that's relative, isn't it? Carved from a block of aluminium they may be (watch the video), but that aluminium probably wasn't made by collecting discarded kitchen foil; it'll have been extracted as bauxite, and then turned into aluminium blocks, which in energy-intensity rivals running a particle collider. So they're "greener" if you don't mind all the fossil fuels burnt to extract the contents and put them together. (I'm assuming the bauxite mines and smelters aren't powered by windmills – though Norway is a favoured location for aluminium smelting because of its plentiful, and green, hydroelectric sources.)
I've also enjoyed the past 18 months or so in which Dell has tried to transform itself into a "green" company. The most amusing part has been its "Plant a tree for me" plan, which tries – apparently not hard enough – to persuade people buying a new computer to purchase carbon offsetting, in the form of one-third of a tree planted per machine, for its first three years. The prices aren't high – £1 per laptop, £3 per desktop – but people aren't biting. The best numbers I can calculate, based on what the company doles out, is that less than 1% of purchased machines are offset.
The point is that Dell does seem to me to understand the need to reduce its impact on the environment. Todd Arbogast, its director of sustainable business, explained that Dell's headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, is powered by a mixture of wind, solar and "methane capture" sources, and it is pushing its suppliers to use more renewable sources of energy, and recycle more. All laudable aims; it's only a pity that its customers don't seem to share them.
There's plenty more, of course. Is it really "green" to use cloud computing? You might think so – after all, it's all happening somewhere else, isn't it? – but if you consider that it means your computer is running, as well as lots of other computers all over the world, then it doesn't. Nick Carr, author of The Big Switch, calculated a while back that each avatar in Second Life, for example, has a carbon footprint as big as the average Brazilian – and that's in addition to their real-world personae, who probably aren't Brazilian, but American.
Or the more recent case, noted by technology journalist Chris Edwards, of a company spotted by the consultancy Ovum which, in Edwards's words, found that "when it came to their [carbon] footprint, some were forced to wear supersized carbon clown shoes: 'One of the delegates, who had travelled from Düsseldorf to Amsterdam, had been told that he had to fly there as it was not company policy to reimburse train fares – despite the fact that in this case there is no direct air service and flying was both considerably more expensive and slower! As this journey involved two relatively short flights, the fuel consumption per passenger was probably about 10 times that of the rail option.'"
Ah, yes, the manifold ways in which we can be tripped up by our own good intentions.
But the question behind it all – and which the latest economic news might make us consider even more carefully – is: why do you need a "new" anything? Isn't there enough computer equipment in your home or business to do what you need? Isn't the real solution to speeding things up or making work easier actually in the software, not the hardware? I suspect that the coming year is going to see some dramatic slowdowns in spending (Gartner has already slashed its forecasts for 2009) and a lot of reevaluation. The question, "Why do you want that again?" is a good one when it comes to hardware. Because the nice thing with software is that it's completely green: you're just reusing the electrons in the wires and magnetic domains on the hard drive. Now that's what I call green.