Yesterday I read on the forum here that HP has introduced an 'ultra-green slimline PC'. It is 95% recyclable and is the first PC to have been awarded the EPEAT Gold Standard for Environmentally Preferable Electronics.

Today I read about Dell making plans to become the Greenest Tech Company. They have all kinds of exciting plans.

Do we have a breakthrough here or is it (unintentional) lip service?

Its both real and greenwashing. These products really are green, but they continue to sell a lot of products that aren't.

Also a lot of it has to do with the introduction of the WEEE directive,which stipulates what amount of a product must be recyclable.

But will this change in the near future, you think? Will they be selling more and more 'green' products and really aim for lower power consumption. I never really understood why Apple never marketed the extreme low power consumption of their Mac Mini's (which aren't even produced anymore, I think).

By the way, what makes the HP machine that won the first EPEAT Gold Award different from other machines? How recyclable in percentages are regular machines? Where did HP reduce toxic materials?

I think we will see more of both. I hope to see less greenwashing, and more real action, but at least we are seeing a lot of real action with the greenwashing, or sometimes a product that is both. The iMac also uses a very small amount of power.

They still sell the Mini, although it is rumored that it will die, which is substantiaed by the fact that it is still on Yonah, not Merom. It would be sad to see it go, as it is by far the cheapest Apple, and it is a great media box (unlike the single-purpose Apple TV), and a great server that you can colo with that Mac Mini colo company, for a low-power dedicated server.

it reminds me of the box that my gigabyte video card came in. on the front it says "gigabyte cares". it has a little heart and states that it's green computing because it's rohs compliant. this is pretty much a joke because, if i'm not mistaken, if a product isn't rohs compliant, it can't be sold in europe. my observations are that corporations make decisions solely based on financial factors (long-term and short-term). for example, if the people in sub-saharan africa came up with a voluntary, yet stringent, environmental standard, do you think dell or hp would ever try to meet this standard?

I know, that's why I started this thread. For instance I read today that Intel and Google target efficient PC power supplies (actually, it's relatively old news). Is it going to happen? When?

Some companies care, some don't. Others respond when Greenpeace nitpicks them, like Apple. Others respond primarily to what the market wants. Others greenwash, like using RoHS to say that they are "green".

i clicked on the link, then i clicked on a link in that article microsoft vs. google. i don't see how anyone competent would give microsoft a green award. sure they've done some things (i was actually mildly surprised by some of it), but what about net impact? there's this behemoth of a resource hog known as windows vista (maybe you've heard of it). how many extra kilowatts does that suck up just to run idle? how many unnecessary upgrades took place just to run the o.s.?

i have an amd athlon xp 2500+ with 512 mb of ram. i run a streamlined version of linux, and i can do pretty much everything the average user does in the same amount of time. every once in a while i'll boot over to the win2k partition and use that. i wouldn't be surprised if vista actually decreased productivity overall. microsoft is certainly not a green company when net results are taken.

Yeah, Vista is pretty bad, especially running 3D graphics all the time for the desktop. No Vista for me. I'll stay with XP, which frankly works better.

Hello,

Here's the EPEAT homepage:

http://www.epeat.net/

...where they list Bronze, Silver, and Gold systems and components. Are these equivalent to the 80 Plus, Bronze, Silver, and Gold?

Here are the criteria: http://www.epeat.net/Criteria.aspx

Bronze: Meets all 23 required criteria
Silver: Meets all 23 required criteria plus at least 50% of the optional criteria
Gold: Meets all 23 required criteria plus at least 75% of the optional criteria

I don't have a clue as to how stringent these criteria are.

I'm hoping that companies like Antec will also someday start thinking about recyclability. It is never mentioned in articles on SPCR. You'd think that the material the Antec P180 is composed of, would be very hard to recycle, being triple layer and such. If there is any market segment that would care, silent computing is probably in it.