Phil Fox Rose

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November 05, 1990

Designing computers as if the planet really mattered

For a product that comes largely out of progressive northern California, personal computers are — maybe not so surprisingly — an environmental nightmare.

Those ex-'60s concerned citizens that went on to found Silicon Valley have packed PCs with elements that are ecologically destructive. But things are beginning to change. The design community is starting to tackle the problems of designing products for later recycling, and board and chip manufacturers are beginning to take environmental concerns seriously as well.

The worst hidden environmental cost of computers is in the chip and board manufacturing processes. When boards are made, manufacturers use chlorofluorocarbon-based solvents to clean the boards. The chlorofluorocarbons attack the ozone layer when released into the atmosphere. The solvents also contain known toxins, such as trichloroethylene, which inevitably find their way into the local water supply.

Manufacturers are looking for alternatives - both to safe cleansers and, less admirably, to more leakproof disposal methods.

Designers are tackling the problem of how top build things so that they can be recycled easily, flying in the face of traditional design methods.

In the past, designers sought the optimal material for each task, using a different metal, plastic, or compound of plastics, metals and glass for each element in a product.

With a variety of materials that cannot be separated easily, if at all, recyclers must relegate the result to an inferior and less profitable plastic soup, useful only for some tasks.

By avoiding compounds altogether, and limiting a product to one type of plastic and one type of metal, and by making the metal and plastic parts easily separable, the designers make it possible for recyclers to break the item down into two piles of pure recyclable material — much more useful and much more profitable.

Of course, the best product of all, ecologically speaking, is one that will last longer and thereby add less to the waste stream, recycled or not. In computers, this means not only making quality products, but also ensuring upgradability rather than building in obsolescence.

These decisions are clearly possible to make today, but the benefit to the manufacturer is not easy to prove in dollars and cents. In fact, the trend in the personal computer market may be going in the opposite direction. As manufacturers compete with Asia and target mass markets, the cost of manufacturing becomes more critical, and cutting corners becomes more attractive.

In the long run, though, we will have no choice but to design computers and all other products as if the planet really mattered.